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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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J.L. Vernon echoes many of the points I made in Are Science Blogging Networks Dead? but also focuses on a distinct aspect, writing Just like the NBA, “Science” is a brand.  It's a message that may be lost on some, or they would self-police a little better and certainly ask their commenters for a little more maturity - but it may be that while science is a brand (Science 2.0, Discover, Nature, etc. certainly always want to make sure writers get benefit beyond traffic from being in respective publications) at Scienceblogs, bloggers are themselves the brand.
Colin Schultz, a video journalist in Ontario, has some tips for aspiring science journalists.   Science readership is going up each year but science journalism jobs are decreasing.  How so?   Some of it is that science literacy is increasing(1) so more and more people can read science directly from the sources, like here, but without editors or journalists pitching stories the breadth of coverage is not complete so independent writing did not harm journalism - the market is up regardless of reasons.  
Fabio Casati and his collaborators at LiquidPublication, an EU-financed research project, want to change how you do science.  Namely by allowing you to do more of it, instead of sifting through journals.

“The more papers you produce, the more brownie points you get,” says Casati. “So most of your time is spent writing papers instead of thinking or doing science.”
No one here at Science 2.0 really noticed the Scienceblogs Pepsigate thing, being busy writing about science, but I lurk in a number of other places and, since Scienceblogs is the Big Kahuna in science blogging, it merited some attention, at least from me.
Science 2.0, being about openness and outreach and participation,  can attract its share of kooks.  Depending on the whims of the community moderators around that day, goofy, speculative nonsense can even stay on the front page as a blog for a while.  It comes with the territory but people who spend money on cameras, lights and lawyers can usually be taken more seriously.

Not always, as PZ Myers found with Expelled filmmakers.  Sometimes the anti-science contingent has both money and an agenda.