Amid hand-wringing about the New York Times disbanding its environment desk and dropping its Green Blog, Thomas Hayden has hopeful thoughts about the environmental news cycle: "First, the record suggests that the beat will be back stronger than ever just as soon as something newly horrifying happens. Second — and this is new — you’ll still be able to get all the environmental reporting you want in the meantime, no matter what the mainstream journalism outlets do."
Miscellaneous
Getting full text of academic journals can be difficult unless you work for a major university or a large corporation that has an account. The National Association of Science Writers has made arrangements for its members with several outlets, including Elsevier and Annual Reviews. This page has a summary of those and other journal resources, and how to apply for access to them. Thanks to the publishers and to NASW member David Levine for the compilation.
If you keep at a job for more than six decades, you get a lot of windows. At least that's how it's worked out for the San Francisco Chronicle's 94-year-old science reporter (and 53-year NASW member) David Perlman, judging from the photo with this Los Angeles Times profile: "He was born in 1918, a decade before the discovery of penicillin. Pluto had yet to be discovered, let alone demoted. The ballpoint pen was invented the year he got his first real newspaper gig."
Freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be, Andrew Careaga writes on Higher Ed Marketing, using Twitter's famous 140-character limit as an example. Working under such constraints can, paradoxically, lead to creative solutions: "Haiku (the 5/7/5 syllable constraint). Limericks. Music (only seven notes to work with). All are constrained. Yet when creative minds accept and work within those constraints, they can create beauty, or at least (with limericks) a laugh or a smile."
Ever been sued over a story? Jack Limpert has, and he recalls sleepless nights, long depositions, and five-figure legal bills for months when nothing much happened. And the settlement: "Other journalists then write and talk about the settlement, suggesting that it appears you had to apologize for your bad behavior, that it probably cost you a lot of money, that it showed how dumb you are. And you can only silently curse the legal gods." Part two.
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan tees off on a New York Times opinion piece praising "confessional writing." "There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time." More from Ann Friedman and Steve Buttry.
Next year brings a remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and CJR has a wide-ranging interview with its host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Among his topics is Tyson's philosophy on Twitter: "The 140 characters are giving you access to how my brain is wired in any day of my life, how I see things. Like my tweet when Mitt Romney suggested that we cut PBS’s budget to reduce the deficit. I said that’s like deleting text files to make space on your 500-gigabyte hard drive."
It could be the brightest comet of our lifetimes, and no, it's not Kohoutek. It's ISON and it tops the list of Smithsonian's 5 Science Stories to Watch in 2013: "Astronomers are predicting that when it passes by us and closely orbits the sun in November and December of 2013, it could be the astronomical sight of our lifetime." We'll see. Also on the list: Drilling into Lake Vostok; algae fuel; Big Bang data; and supercomputers in medicine.
If you don't feel up to slogging through a dozen or more lists of the top science stories of 2012, keep an eye on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, where Charlie Petit is collecting lists and commenting on them. The Higgs boson and the Curiosity landing get lots of ink, but you won't want to miss Oops! 5 Retracted Science Studies of 2012 and The 10 Most Blushworthy Science Stories of 2012, both from LiveScience.
"I broke the cancer cure story for the Associated Press," Bob Cullen writes on the About Writing and Editing blog. Did you miss it? No surprise. The story — from 1972 — never hit the A-wire. A New York editor ran it past an AP science writer and it all fell apart. Cullen: "It may be lamentable when cynicism dominates a reporter’s outlook on all phases of life, but it’s a close cousin of skepticism, and skepticism is as important to a journalist as his laptop."