The digital media age serves up uncertainty as well as opportunity. One solution to the anemic job pool for science writers is to grow beyond journalism into entrepreneurship, specifically into digital publishing. Training for this kind of career growth is exactly what the Knight Digital Media Center offers in its intensive, weeklong workshop called Independent Journalist. From the Fall 2011 ScienceWriters.

An appeals court has (for a second time) tried to reject settlement of a long-running U.S. Copyright class action suit over unauthorized use of freelance magazine articles in data bases. Meanwhile, if you have written for Canadian magazines or newspapers, you should check out terms of a Canadian class-action settlement for similar unauthorized use of freelance articles. For details, see this update from NASW member Jeff Hecht.

In this hour-long podcast, tax expert and regular ScienceWriters columnist Julian Block offers tips for staying on the taxman's good side without cheating yourself in the process. Some highlights: How to stay out of trouble as a solo practitioner (7:00); Is taking the home office deduction a red flag for an audit? (10:30); What to do when you use the same computer for business and personal use (16:00); Who gets audited and who doesn't? (22:30).

A federal judge in New York has set aside the latest version of Google's class action settlement with the Authors Guild over the search giant's scanning and archiving of some 12 million books, many still under copyright. For discussion of what happens now, see this analysis on the Scholarly Kitchen blog, with a list of links to other coverage of the ruling, and a longer review on The Laboratorium.