William McPherson won a Pulitzer for the Washington Post but now, in retirement, he lives in what he calls poverty, getting by on Social Security and a Post pension. The story of how he got to that point is a cautionary tale for anyone in the middle class: "I look through my checkbooks from twenty-five and thirty years ago and I think, Wow! What happened? It was a long, slowly accelerating slide but the answer is simple. I was foolish, careless, and sometimes stupid."
Miscellaneous
During the ScienceWriters2014 meeting, Amber Dance and Dennis Meredith were awarded the annual Diane McGurgan Service award, which recognizes outstanding volunteer contributions to the National Association of Science Writers. The award is named after NASW's former executive director Diane McGurgan. Amber and Dennis co-chair the Science in Society Journalism Awards program. Read more to learn about their contributions to NASW.
Mizzou's Katherine Reed discusses the changes that are needed in journalism education, and the obstacles to those changes — especially faculty members whose expertise and teaching methods are more appropriate for the ink-on-paper past than the digital present and future: "Universities are being starved for cash, and endowments don’t necessarily come bearing gift tags for faculty training. So faculty teach what they know, and that might not be cutting edge."
Lisa Cron offers a dozen tips, drawn from fiction, on how to capture and hold the reader's attention to a story: "What actually hooks a reader is very different from what we’ve been led to believe. It’s even very different from what seems logical, clear and obvious – which is that readers are hooked by the beautiful writing, the clever plot, the fresh voice, and so on and so forth. All those things are great, no denying it, but they’re not what readers come for."
It is with sadness that we share the announcement of ScienceOnline’s dissolution. The ScienceOnline organization's ideas and energy have been an inspiration to science writers and made a significant and lasting contribution to communicating science in the digital world. Reaction from Paul Raeburn, Pascale H. Lane. Storify from Kirk Englehardt.
Magazines are famous for having teams of fact-checkers who strive to verify everything their publication prints. Book publishers, however, generally make no such effort, Kate Newman writes for Atlantic: "What many readers don’t realize is that fact-checking has never been standard practice in the book-publishing world at all. And reliance on books creates a weak link in the chain of media accuracy, says Scott Rosenberg, founder of the now-defunct MediaBugs.org."
Joseph Lichterman writes about a program that took journalism professors from historically black colleges and universities and placed them in major newsrooms: "Many had been away from newsrooms for a number of years already or had never worked in a large multi-platform newsroom, and they said that working alongside journalists in those newsrooms allowed them to realize the skills their students would need to succeed and actually get jobs in journalism after graduating."
John Kroll lists his favorites, including titles such as Linda Ellerbee's And So It Goes and Robert McKee's Story, and his commenters list dozens more that he left out: "Most of the books on this list are older; it takes time to prove value. I’ve tried to represent the digital future, but technical books grow outdated quickly, and the future is so uncertain that I’m hesitant to anoint any book as prescient." More from Jim Romenesko.
Denise Graveline writes about longstanding tension between the online encyclopedia and the public relations industry: "Communicators fret about not being able to make simple factual changes to Wikipedia pages about their companies or organizations, but that yen to make changes has led some to revise history, or at least try to do so." But she sees hope in a recent statement by 11 PR firms pledging "a commitment to follow Wikimedia's Terms of Use."
Jeb Lund has a contrarian view of journalism on Twitter. Lund argues that aggregating tweets and even just using the "MT" tag amount to theft of intellectual property: "For a profession enamored of examining how the sausage gets made – via gossip and high-mindedness – few people want to address whether a large part of that process, when it comes to Twitter, is theft. Appropriation, lifting, bigfooting, whatever you want to call it – it happens on scales large and small."