Bora points to this report about mega shakeups at Scientific American. The editor for nearly a generation, John Rennie, is out. Nature Publishing Group is now calling the shots. In non-science news Ezra Klein, king of all journolism, is moving to The Washington Post. We live in the age of creative destruction when it comes to media. I'm a dabbler in in writing about science, but as the years go by it seems that the media itself is converging upon my own bloggish means of production. I know that Ross Douthat is going to produce print-worthy column prose for The New York Times, but I have to think there'll be a qualitative stylistic difference from the days of William Safire influenced by Douthat's "New Media" exposure.
Speaking of converged New Media, there should be a bloggingheads.tv episode up Sunday or Monday which features myself & Jake Young.
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I've never rated Scientific American. I don't know why; it's just never appealed. Whereas I read New Scientist every week from, I suppose, age 14 to 24 or so. Now I read it only in the waiting room at the dentist's or the GP's. In all those years its policies are unchanged:-
(i) Everyone else should bow down before the wisdom of the god-like scientists,
(ii) And fund them without limit.
I've always liked Scientific American, but I think its glory days are well behind it. I have a particular beef with its recent string of ugly dark front covers, a bad case of instantly dated graphic design.
And of course like a lot of traditional media outlets Scientific American missed out on the whole new media thing; I guess they were trying to become Discover when they should have been doing ScienceBlogs.