My essay on how the internet is changing science journalism has been published as part of a collection called Science and the Media by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The volume includes contributions from leading science journalists such as Alan Alda, Cristine Russell and Cornelia Dean, edited by Donald Kennedy and Geneva Overholser. The editors write: The essays in this volume discuss the roles of scientists, journalists, and public information officers
PDF The idea of electronic paper tends to appeal to a generation that has grown up with newspapers. At the Future of Science Journalism symposium at MIT this week, one of the presentations was about E Ink by the company’s director of marketing, David Jackson. The talk was full of information about how E Ink’s technology could be used for flexible displays, mimicking paper. Most of the examples were small form
Katherine Sharpe, Seed magazine’s manager of ScienceBlogs provided an insight into how the blog aggregator works at the Knight science journalism conference. ScienceBlogs kicked off in January 2006 with 12 blogs and now, two years later, brings together 70. Katherine explained how Seed quickly realised that bringing the blogs together into a science metablog created something bigger than the sum of its parts and the traffic reflected this. The posts
Day two of the Knight science journalism symposium in Boston and Henry Jenkins of MIT blasts the audience with a sprint through new media, popular culture and new possibilities for science journalism. The thrust of his talk was how participatory culture is changing how we acquire knowledge, changing what we mean by the term “expert” and how we can work together as a collective intelligence. Henry’s critique of journalists is
I caught up with Clive Thompson after his talk at the Knight Science Journalism symposium and asked him about his love of blogging. His blog is Collision Detection. (Shot on a Nokia N95) Print
Clive Thompson has just bombarded a room full of science journalists about the joys of blogging and Twittering. Thompson was a Knight Science fellow, during which he became his blog, Collision Detection. Today, at a symposium to mark the 25th anniversary of the fellowships at MIT, he evangelised about the benefits of blogging. For Clive, he blogs to improve the way he thinks. The blog was what Cory Doctorow describes
I’m at the Future of Science Journalism symposium this week, organised for the 25th anniversary of the Knight science fellowships at MIT. On the agenda is a discussion about the prospects for science journalism in a multimedia age and I’ll be talking about multiplatform working on Wednesday. But the event was kicked off by Boyce Rensberger, director of the fellowships programme, looking back at the historical relationship between science and
Here is the video of my keynote, Reimagining Science Journalism, at Future Directions in Science Journalism Conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in November, hosted by the UBC School of Journalism. The keynote is in two chunks: Part I: Part II: Print
The young journalists behind Inkling Magazine are into science reporting because, as they say in their tag line, “science rocks”. One of the founders of the science blog, Anne Casselman, took part in the Future Directions in Science Journalism conference over the weekend at UBC. During a session about why people go online for science news, she gave an illuminating insight into Inkling’s readers. The site gets some 40,000 page
On Friday 9 November, I had the privilege of delivering the keynote address at the opening of the Future Directions in Science Journalism conference at the University of British Columbia. Entitled, Reimagining Science Journalism, the talk examined how the way audiences are getting news and information about science is changing, with the Internet emerging as a key resource. The challenge is how to revitalize science journalism for a digital age.