Scientific American’s editor, John Rennie, concurs that as other news outlets struggle to nurture similar communities, active engagement on the part of editors and staffs is key: “It would be a fatal mistake to just scratch out an area on the ground and say, ‘Here’s where the community is,’ and then just expect people to jump in.” Those who have jumped in to SciAm have been very responsible participants, Nicholson says, and the publication has had few difficulties with hostile or irrelevant posting. When it comes to experiments like Waldrop’s article on Science 2.0, the fact that the site doesn’t allow readers to live-edit the draft guards against irresponsible tampering. But if all goes well with this article, Nicholson would like to see the platform evolve into something “not quite wiki, but more than commenting.”

Scientific American is not the only pioneer of what can now be called, because of its growing momentum, Science Journalism 2.0. In January 2006, Seed Media Group, which publishes Seed magazine, launched the resoundingly successful ScienceBlogs.com community. The site features a running ticker, which as of Wednesday counted sixty-seven blogs, over 56,000 posts, and over 626,000 comments. There are also links back into the magazine, as well as to Seed online’s “Daily Zeitgeist,” a collection of links to timely takes on science issues from throughout the Web. It all supports Seed’s creed that “science is culture.”

Wired magazine’s science team has patched together a more external Science Journalism 2.0 community. Rather than keeping it in-house, as Scientific American and Seed do, Wired Science relies on a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Google Reader items, and a del.icio.us feed. The community appears to be the result of the Wired Science blogging unit’s effort to give its “loyal readers complete access to the fermenting vat of journalistic juices from which our posts bubble daily,” according to a post last week by Brandon Keim. “It might not ever be truly complete, which in some ways is a Platonic ideal attainable only through real-time links to our gray matter-something you’d probably enjoy even less than us. But we can give you access to a rough cut of this chapter of science journalism, as well as a chance to shape it yourself.”

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