Academic Writing vs. Blogging: Paul Krugman as a Case Study

New media are having a significant impact on Knowledge Dissemination (KD) and on the way academics communicate expert knowledge to lay people. Notably, in addition to traditional research articles, academics have begun to use social networks, and in particular blogs, to communicate not only within their own community but also outside their community. In an attempt to examine the language and discourse strategies associated with the translation of domain-specific knowledge into blogs, this study sets out to examine contrastively two comparable corpora which are representative of the scientific and KD production of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, a sample of scientific papers and a selection of posts published on the blog The Conscience of a Liberal are analysed in their keywords and phraseological patterns. The analysis shows that a well-built argumentation based on theories and models typical of Economics research articles tends to be counterbalanced in blog posts by a critical, collaborative and participatory debate on up-to-date economic and political events.