Next week, I’ll be chairing a session at the Science Online 2010 conference called Rebooting science journalism in the age of the web. I’ll be shooting the breeze with Carl Zimmer, John Timmer and David Dobbs about the transition of journalism from sheets of plant pulp to wires and wi-fi. The title of the talk had been set before the panel was assembled but, being biologists at heart, we’re going to shift the metaphor from a technological one to an evolutionary one.

As a species, science journalists (in all their varied forms and behaviours) have found themselves thrust into a new digital ecosystem that presents fresh challenges to their survival. Some individuals will have adaptive traits