Science Journalism/Communication week in review

Lots of interesting stuff this week, so I decided to put everything in a single post - makes it easier for everyone....

First, there was a very nice article in Columbia Journalism Review (which someone subscribed me to - I guess because my name appeared there the other week....someone is trying to remind me how it feels to read stuff written on actual paper!) about the beginning of a resurgence of science journalism in North Carolina. The article covers all the bases, focusing mostly on the new Monday science pages produced collaboratively by The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer, including the history of how the project came about (which I did not know until now). It also mentions ScienceOnline2010 and then delves some into the new online project ScienceInTheTriangle.org (the website of which is about to undergo some nice redesign and renewed activity soon):

Colin Schultz is writing an interesting blog about science journalism - check out his archives for older posts. But specifically, I want to draw your attention to the interviews he recently conducted with some of the interesting people in science journalism, especially with Carl Zimmer, David Dobbs and Ed Yong (only John Timmer is missing to have a complete 'Rebooting science journalism' panel from ScienceOnline2010).

Speaking of interviews, my Scio10 series of interviews with people interested in science communication from various angles is growing fast and strong (I already have two more lined up for next week).

I was also busy myself, with three provocative blog posts on the topic: Why it is important for media articles to link to scientific papers, Science blogs and public engagement with science and New science journalism ecosystem: new inter-species interactions, new niches, all three of which received quite a lot of response around the blogo/twitter-sphere (mostly, surprisingly, quite positive!). The last one, especially, appears to fit in this week's theme of The Future of Context.

NYTimes had a nice long feature about a mommyblogging conference, which is wonderful, but made me unhappy that a similar article never appeared in NYTimes for any of our four ScienceOnline conferences - don't tell me there is absolutely NO audience for that!?

I would like to go to The Online News Association meeting but for that to happen, you need to vote for and comment on my panel.

Chris Brodie's class on Explaining Science to the Public (introduced here) has posted several interesting blog posts analyzing three long newspaper articles by Carl Zimmer.

Dennis Meredith, author of the excellent Explaining Research book, has a new press release - Cultural Flaw Hampers Scientists in Public Battles, Says New Book. He was also a guest of Ernie Hood (current chair of SCONC) on his weekly science radio show Radio In Vivo and wrote a new blog post - Communicating Research in 3-D Virtual Worlds.

Also listen to the interview with Andrew Revkin - The Death of Science Writing, and the Future of Catastrophe.

Finally, Chris Perrien took that board (remember?) everyone signed at the end of ScienceOnline2010 and framed it. Yesterday he presented it to us during lunch at RTP and everyone pulled out the iPhones and took pictures - here is one (you can see more on my Facebook profile....):