The fifth international school of Science Journalism will be held in the small town of Erice, in Sicily (Italy) between June 9th and 14th. The event is organized by the INFN, and I wish to publicize it here also because I will give a contribution there.

The general theme of the school this years is "The Digital World: Computing, Networks, and Us". From the "About" tab in the conference site:

"The ways in which the paradigm of the WWW on the one hand and the availability of huge computing facilities on the other have opened possibilities in a variety sciences, technologies and social interactions that are re-shaping our Society."

"The goal is to allow a new generation of science journalists to experience a frontier science presentation and, at the same time, to introduce them to the challenges of their profession."

My contribution will be in the form of a discussion of the different points of strength of science blogging versus science journalism in general. Blogging has become an important player in the distribution of scientific information to the general public in the course of the last decade, and science popularization magazines have been suffering from that online competition -which is more agile, is quicker on the news, and often just as correct and valuable, since its authors are often the same scientists who produce the research.

Of course science blogging can't, and should not, become a substitute of printed magazines; the latter have usually a much broader diffusion, offer a uniform coverage of topics, and their asynchronous content is less driven by events than by an editorial strategy. There is of course interplay between the two media, and in fact most scientific magazines have now their own blogs. Exploring that interplay will be the subject of my lecture.