Time for some livestreaming! At the end of this week I’ll be heading to North Carolina to Scienceonline 2010, a confab about all things scientific on the Tubes. I’m going to be talking in a session on Saturday morning at 10:15 am called “Rebooting Science Journalism In the Age of the Web” along with fellow rebooters Ed Yong, John Timmer, and David Dobbs. You can watch live on UStream and Second Life. Later, our session (and all the others) will end up where everything ends up sooner or later: on YouTube. (More details here.)
Here’s the official description of our session:
Are blogs and mainstream media the bitter rivals that stereotypes would have us believe, or do the two sides have common threads and complementary strengths? How will the tools of the Internet change the art of reporting? How will the ongoing changes strengthen writing about science? How might these changes compromise or threaten writing about science? In a world where it’s possible for anyone to write about science, where does that leave professional science journalists? And who actually are these science journalists anyway?
If you want something to read in advance, Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime movers behind this conference, has kindly organized a veritable banquet of food for thought on this topic. If you’re interested in the experiences and opinions I bring to the discussion, read this. Basically, I find kvetching and yearning for some global system a waste of time. I am interested in people doing new things.
ScienceOnline has a strong tradition of openness, and so you’re welcome to visit the session wiki and help us formulate the discussion in advance. You can also start a discussion here, which I will track.
January 13th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Hi Mr. Zimmer,
Any chance you are going to The Monti at Alivia’s on Thursday night? I won’t be attending any of the ScienceOnline sessions (overlaps with a TB science meeting being held over the weekend at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill), but am going to Alivia’s as a guest of one of the meeting sponsors. I’m an aspiring science writer (have written a few articles about the exploits of the faculty at UNC) and just think it would be cool to meet you.
As for the comment above, don’t pretty much all of the mainstream media outfits also have blogs? I think these online discussions complement and expand on the topics that often get only superficial treatment in the mainstream outlets. Looking forward to hearing more about what comes out of the meeting!
[Sorry, Jessica--I'll be showing up on Friday. As for your question, indeed, many media outfits have blogs. At this point a lot are functioning as first-person, continuously-updated news wires.]