From the Committee to Protect Journalists and former Washington Post editor Len Downie comes a report on the Obama Administration's war on leaks: "Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists."
Miscellaneous
"Journalists by and large never want to be pitched on Facebook," Zoe Fox writes. "Journalists, especially ones who consider their Twitter account to be an extension of their reporting, want to maintain some semblance of privacy on Facebook." That's among the social media etiquette tips Fox offers for PR/PIO people who want to get their message out. Among others: Never send your pitch to a reporter's personal email accounts, and no more than one followup per pitch.
Our brains are hard-wired to make mistakes, Craig Silverman writes at Poynter, and that's why copyeditors are necessary — to protect writers from the errors that our brains inevitably make — or miss — as we write: "Editors often talk about coming at a piece of text with “fresh eyes” in order to see things in a different way. What this means … is that we have to hack our brains in order to get past innate blind spots and re-orient towards spotting mistakes."
Remember that thrilling Peter Benchley novel, Leviathan Rising? How about the Civil War classic, Bugles Sang True? And of course there's that modern non-fiction political whodunit, At This Point in Time. If you're drawing a blank, don't feel bad — all of those titles were changed before their books came out, Bill Lucey writes at NewspaperAlum, in a musing prompted by Mark Leibovich’s new book This Town, which was almost You’ll Always Eat Lunch in this Town Again.
Two experts working with the Sunday Times used "forensic stylometry" to conclude that Robert Galbraith's novel The Cuckoo's Calling was actually written by the Harry Potter author, Ben Zimmer writes: "Their high-profile investigation provides some insight into the strengths and limitations of computerized authorship analysis, which has applications not just in the literary world but in legal inquiries as well." More from Virginia Hughes.
The evolutionary theorist had some profound, if less heralded, insights into language, Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings: "What set us apart from animals, he argued, was a matter of degree, not kind — a greater ability to produce sounds and ideas, an expression of our higher mental powers. Where humans differ from other animals, Darwin believed, is simply in our greater capacity to put together sounds with ideas, which is a function of our higher mental powers."
The most famous of all environmental writers was an unexceptional student, Gabriel Popkin writes, but that coursework made her eventual career possible: "While at Johns Hopkins, Rachel Carson made an important journey from inexperienced biology student to jaded researcher to skillful narrator of nature," Popkin writes. Carson's education gave her "the foundation to become the most famous science writer of her age and the voice that launched the environmental movement."
Read it and weep. James Somers is a computer programmer who gets unsolicited $120,000 job offers, but what he really wants to be is a writer. Trouble is, no one seems to be willing to pay that kind of money for writing, Somers laments in an Aeon post questioning the value of his work: "Despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear."
If you missed the NASW-sponsored Cross-Border Science Journalism Workshop April 27 in La Jolla, Ca., then take a look at these archived webcasts posted by Genevive Bjorn. Almost 30 U.S. and Mexican science journalists attended the one-day workshop to exchange ideas, discuss health and environmental issues, solve problems and start collaborations. See Bjorn's "Confronting the Barrier of the Border" on Storify for more.
Chad Orzel is a scientist who blogs, and he sounds uneasy about increasing competition from professional science writers: "I worry that the professionalization of the hobby is squeezing out the, well, hobbyists. One of the things I try to stress is that blogging is a low-maintenance activity — it can be done on a strictly hobby-type basis, by people who do not have and do not necessarily want careers in science writing. Blogging doesn’t have to be a career."