In this economy, science writers are looking for new outlets to write for. This was apparent as an overflow crowd heard editors talk on what they're looking for in potential writers at the session "Pitching Science to Non-Science Magazines" at ScienceWriters 2009 in Austin.

I expected the ScienceWriters 2009 workshop moderated by Robin Lloyd and Christie Nicholson, social media mavenettes working for Scientific American, entitled "Social Media — Why, Where and How," to cover the whole Social Media scene for me so that I'd perhaps see some value to it all. Social media was defined by Lloyd as places where "you receive, consolidate, share information." Regrettably the well publicized social media websites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn were barely mentioned. This session was a sales job for Twitter.

Angry red trapezoids kill and eat the carcasses of their green kin. Critters turn blue to signal their desire to mate. Adults gobble their young. Welcome to Polyworld, the purported answer to one of the biggest unsolved problems in science: a theory of consciousness.

A day-long game at ScienceWriters 2009 allowed NASW members to tackle head-on the question weighing heaviest on the minds of science writers everywhere: What is the future of our field? As a reflection of just how dire a media landscape fraught with so much unprecedented change has become, the game kicked off with the prediction of an exuberant deus ex machina.