EDITOR IN CHIEF Mariette DiChristina of Scientific American.
Image: Ethan Hill
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced today that Mariette DiChristina will formally assume the top editorial post of Scientific American, effective immediately. She becomes the eighth editor in chief of Scientific American and the first woman to hold the position. She had been the acting editor in chief, a title she assumed this past June after the departure of then–editor in chief, John Rennie.
She joined Scientific American in 2001 as its executive editor; previously, she spent 14 years at Popular Science, becoming its executive editor.
In announcing the appointment, NPG Managing Director Steven Inchcoombe said in a statement that DiChristina was "the natural choice to lead Scientific American's editorial team, and I look forward to working together with her to develop Scientific American to increase its impact and its value to its readers across all media."
NPG assumed management of Scientific American earlier this year. In the past, both operated as sister organizations under Macmillan Publishers, Ltd.
As editor in chief, DiChristina oversees the print and online editions of Scientific American and Scientific American Mind as well as all newsstand special editions. She is also the current president of the National Association of Science Writers and has been an adjunct professor at the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program of New York University. Recently, she was honored by New York's Italian Heritage and Culture Committee in its October 2009 celebration of Galileo's contributions to science.
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25 Comments
Add CommentBest wishes! Please continue the goods works but do not be afraid of change!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA challenging task. Get wide enough readership to pay the bills without dumbing down any further. A mix of heavy and light might do it. Just don't make it into Popular Science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(I've been a reader since high school days, and that's about 60 years.)
After Rennies tenure I hope that SA will return to the levelof the 1970s
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA warm congratulations from freezing-cold Colorado. My humble request? The publishing world seems enamored with the facile practice of making "lists" of everything under the sun. Please leave headlines such as "8 ways to save the planet," "10 top discoveries," or anything of that sort, to the grocery store magazines. Your readers are perfectly capable of sorting information into multifarious categories all our own ... what we seek is more of the excellent writing, scientific information, beautiful graphics, and opinion columns that have made the magazine stand apart from all the others. We wish you luck in performing your essential work in a difficult industry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWarm wishes from freezing-cold Colorado. My one request is that I'd love to see SciAm avoid the facile tendency, popular in the publishing world, of making numbered lists of everything under the sun. Trust your reader's intelligence and we will continue to trust you. Follow common wisdom and the magazine will end up just that: common. Good luck in a difficult industry!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI too have read Scientific American since high school (about 50 years) and I miss some of the old features and style (particularly The Amateur Scientist). SciAm remains America’s best general readership science magazine, but I worry some about its dilution. Science enables technology and technology (e.g. the Hubble Telescope) can greatly facilitate the process of science, as well as to illustrate its principles, but they are really rather different things. It’s a tricky distinction, especially considering that my beloved Amateur Scientist was often about making home-brew rockets or (when it was a positive rarity) a quartz-controlled clock. I think it is mainly a matter of focus.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientific American has become a fat Science News. How will you keep me from choosing sides?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe reason I stopped taking Scientific American is that the magazine became a tool of politics. Last year, I read articles about alternate energy sources, which were not written by scientists or based on scientific evidence, Just three company presidents with a wish list and a huge request for Federal funding. I remember that Solar energy one as just requiring $432 Billion of government funding over 40 years which did not include 39,000 square miles of Arixona and New Mexico. This type of "science" occured all to often, and real science was rare in the last few years. Take the magazine back to the place where real science is reported. It is clear from your environmental that you are not reporting facts as determined by the scientific method, just the hearsay of UN scientists and Al Gore.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother long time reader, since high school (about 40 years). Like many long time readers, this magazine has a special place in my heart and in my library.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne issue, imho, is that politics had encroached recently, to where I thought the name was changed to PoliSciAm (POS). While it's a painful part of most realities; the biases, opinions, religions, and agendas interfere with and detract from the science generally, and corrupt the sheer joy which science can create. It is an ugly underside that adds nothing to science and is best left hidden (consider Copernicus, Galileo, William Smith, Tesla). Please return to a far ranging mix of heavy and light science, and leave the politics completely to other venues.
Just my two cents.
I stopped my Scientific American subscription last year because I felt the magazine had strayed far from its original purpose over the last few years. To me it was promoting idealogy and not science. This treatment has gone on for years where true science is not the major topic of the magazine. I particularly take esception with the way you report climate with only the less than adaquate science of the UN and no science that contradicts the UN position. You never even challenged the science behind Al Gore's "inconvenient Truth". To many articles have political overtones. I recall the issue that caused me to not renew my subscription. It envolved alternate energy sources (about which I am somewhat an experiencd scientist). The articles were written by three company presidents and they apparently had no science background. The thrust of the solar energy article was that for just $432 billion in government funding over 40 years, the entire country could be converted to solar energy. Of course, this number did not include the cost of 39,000 square miles of New Mexico and Arizona, not solving the complex problem of creating a new type distribution grid. and solving some of the enormous problems in the generation and transmission of solar energy. I would like to see Scientific American become the magazine it once was, reporting scientific findings based on the scientific method to its readers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have been a continous subscriber to Scientific American since my parents gave me a subscription for my 15th birthday in 1957 which means I have read most of the original 50 year articles of those now cited in the 50, 100, and 150 year section.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a trend of the last several years to which I take great exception. What I object to is the full page graphics that seem to accompany each and every article. In almost all cases they contribute absolutely nothing to the article's informational content. If all those pages were removed, the SA could add another article without increasing total pages which would be far more interesting. I also find the the phrase inserts and large swaths of white space to be publishing cliches that should be omitted in favor of more text and relevant illustrations. As an architect I have an appreciation for good gaphics but they must communicate useful information. SA has always had exceptionally clear and informative graphics within articles and that continues to be an essential feature. Please restrain your art director.
I think that Sci. Am. has achieved a nice balance of technical and not so technical reporting. I’ve been reading it for several decades, subscribing for most of that time. Its graphics are very useful and feature selections are good. The recent comments here about environment and energy reporting are off-base. Environmental and energy science/engineering is fundamental to framing the most critical social policy decisions of our time, and should be a regular part of this journal’s coverage. Also, I disagree with the complaint asserted by a few commentators here and elsewhere, that Sci. Am. should get more technical. For an intelligent general science reader time available for digesting science articles is very limited -- Sci. Am. does a good job with that group – it is not primarily addressing those who will be reading technical journals such as Nature, Science, Algorithmica, Jour. of Chemical Physics, & etc. PS- Steve Mirsky / Science Talk podcast is great.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuite difficult to add commentaries after what these fine gentlemen say. There seems to be a drought in production of good science. People seem to be under too much stress and pressed to publish whatever they have. I think that Scientific American is a tremendous source of very valuable information and all that information should easily be at the fingertips of any reader at a very affordable price. Certainly an effort should be made to give room to reports on pure good science aside from news coming from the technical and scientific fields. Anyone that has something to say in relation to science and technology should have voice in Scientific American and if there is a bias it should be toward science and technology at its best. It would be interesting to include something for the amateur scientist and to make younger people interested in science and mathematics without forgetting that Scientific American is a top level magazine of its kind even when it targets the general readership. Good luck to the beautiful young lady that is been put at the helm of what seems to be an important and interesting job!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMs DiChristina,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI too, have been reading Scientific American for decades and I really miss "The Amateur Scientist" and the quality of Forest Mims III. I have saved ALL my older back issues for the express purpose of being able to refer to "The Amateur Scientist" and other articles.
There is a desperate need to bring real science to the people rather than "high and mighty" articles that push various agendas. I for one, love to build scientific instruments with my own hands, telescopes, microscopes, seismographs, magnetic field strength meters, stepping motor driver circuits, equipment to measure the speed of light and other similar instruments and experiments.
I never did get a response to my letter pointing out the gross error in an article in the August 2007 issue by R. Douglas Fields, M.A. Ph.D. on the ability of sharks to sense electric currents in sea water. The correction of this error never appeared in "Errata" either, as far as I know.
In that article, the author stated that, One millionth of a volt across a centimeter of seawater can be distinguished by a shark. This is equivalent to a voltage gradient created by a 1.5 volt AA battery with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in the waters off Jacksonville Florida.
That implies that the distance from long Island, NY to Jacksonville, Florida is only 1.5 million centimeters or 9.32 miles!
I only offer that instance to demonstrate how the SciAm readership has been expected to swallow everything whole without using critical thinking. Please insist that your authors keep their Facts and Suppositions clearly separate!
Best wishes for a long and honorable career at SciAm!
I also regret the dumbing down of Scientific American. Almost no chemical structures or mathematic equations are ever shown anymore. I understand that excessive detail detracts from the flow of the article but the balance has shifted too far. I still enjoy the magazine and will not cancel my subscription but I hope the new editor will revisit the policies concerning content.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI sincerely hope she will be a breath of fresh air in a scientific world that is preoccupied, to the point of intellectual somnambulism, by its concentration on carbon dioxide.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCongratulations to Ms. DiChristina. Like many of the other writers here, I've found that SciAm has gotten lighter on science and heavier on editorial content. I agree with many of the other sentiments and therefore offer a top 3 list of things you should do: 1) publish more of the other side e.g., an article by Sarah Palin on climate change , 2) comment on how science is used to justify political decisions like restricting smoking or vaccinating children, and finally 3) publish some articles by energy company executives to show how we can maintain our lifestyles with abundant fossil fuels indefinitely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMa'am, I wish you luck, but you will find a thread running through these comments - dumbing down. Whether you like it or not, and whether it is politically correct or not, there seems to be a gender bias in popular scientific journalism. As well as dumbing down, there is a tendency towards sociology and health/medicine, with no real hardcore science writing which readers will find a challenge. In the UK, our flagship science programme on television ("Horizon" has been under a female editorial team for some time and it really shows. It has lost its bite, and has been preoccupied with human physiology and a "human interest" angle so that things like physics, astronomy, and materials science are wholly neglected. I no longer bother to watch it. No-one admires the many excellent women who have achieved greatness in science more than I do. What I question is quite different - a perceived gender bias in scientific journalism towards human biology "human interest" topics. Good luck with your new job, John Rennie will not be a hard act to follow, but please consider your readership, who in these comments are trying to tell you something important.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(BTW, resurrecting the Amateur Scientist would be editorially courageous, and hugely appreciated by your readers) Good luck in what we all hope will be a successful resuscitation! HJ
I have taken Scientific American since 1973, and kept them all until a small house fire. Mostly, as a maths student I wanted Martin Gardner's articles. After he left there were some valient attempts to follow him, and I kept on subscribing. I finally gave up this year. The whole thing has become too light; it isn't properly science any more. Coupled with that are a series of administrative blunders that cost me money so I thought it was time to part company. I promise to keep watching and might come back, one day. Perhaps.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs an inventor, busy on energy conversion improvements, I have been shocked by Scientific American's endorsement of outlandishly inefficient power leveling schemes. A specific example is compressed air underground. The losses incurred directly heat the planet, and are far higher than competing systems. I am trying to promote five different systems, each of which has full cycle losses of less than 5 %. An example: Steel flywheel in a well. The well serves as an inexpensive scatter shield.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs an inventor, seriously working on energy conversion problems. I have been shocked by Sci Am's endorsement of outlandishly inefficient power leveling schemes. For instance: Underground storage of compressed air, directly heats the planet with the high and irrecoverable losses. I have been promoting five different methods, each with full cycle losses of less than 5%. An example is: Steel Flywheel in a Well, using the well as an inexpensive, thoroughly safe scatter shield.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a good one from Amazon
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.amazon.com/review/RY4UXTEU5KZ6M/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
It is so true the editorial glory days of this venerable publication are long past. The greatness of the '50s, '60's, '70s; the magazine was apparently content with its position of world leadership in non peer-reviewed science publishing. Then came the great fall, probably to squeeze a larger revenue stream from a broader audience. Ha! Remember when the great engineering firms used to advertise routinely for new talent? Yes, I too loved Martin Gardner, and the Amateur Scientist under C. L. Stong was fantastic. But all I really ask is that there is a replacement of the 'dumbing down' with a 'smartening up'. Would you really lose so much money? Couldn't you charge more for advertising if you could show your readership was more intelligent and educated, and hence. more influential?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnder Society and Science in the May 2010 issue, you address letters you recieve and thier foundations. But you make the same mistake you are adressing by saying; "Science findings are not random opinions but the result of a rational, critical process". In one sense I totally agree, but more and more we must take motive into the evaluation of results. Just as journalism has lost it's reputation to a few bad apples. The Science community is going to suffer larger and larger set backs as integrity gives way to greed. It's hard to get a grant when your findings reveal that there isn't a disaster looming.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnder the new editor, Scientific American, once a highly respected scientific publication, has become a political instrument for advancement of causes. I do not believe a scientific journal should carry a political banner of any kind. Moreover, Popular Science where DiChristina gained her experience is not in par with Scientific American.
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