John Timmer

Me (right) hypnotizing Carl Zimmer just before the Rebooting Science Journalism session at ScienceOnline 2010. It worked. Carl had planned to use his 5 minutes to just say, "We are DOOOMED." Instead he talked about duck sex. I've been meaning for two weeks now to post on ScienceOnline 2010 and the Rebooting Science Journalism session, in which I joined Ed Yong, John Timmer, and Carl Zimmer as "unpanelists." Lest another frenzied week delay me further, here's my addition to the #scio10 #reboot corpus. Journalists-v-bloggers is (almost) dead Many at the conference, and pretty much everyone…
Tomorrow I fly to North Carolina for the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, or unconference, where on Saturday I will sit down with Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer, John Timmer, and anyone else who squeezes into the room, to talk about rebooting science journalism. The obvious assumption behind the topic (if I can return to the titular metaphor) is that science journalism is such a mess that it needs not just cleaning up, but a wholesale restart. But "rebooting" is probably too mild a term for what most people think is needed; if we're to stick with digital metaphors, I'd to say the assumption is more that…
At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest. One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…