IRE President and New York Times editor Sarah Cohen has some advice on where to get started in working with data: "No matter what others say, a strong facility with Excel is pretty much a baseline. It’s the tool of choice for so many other people that if you are not proficient with it, you really can’t even get started … I know there are people who think Excel is terrible and that we shouldn’t be teaching closed-source tools. But it is still on everybody’s desktop."
Science writing news
Her late mother’s 1963 travel diary inspired Jane Stein’s children’s book, presented as letters from a teacher to her students: Dear Class: Traveling Around the World with Mrs. J.
New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, a physician and newspaper correspondent for 20 years, is the recipient of the 2014 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. Rosenthal will receive a $3,000 award and certificate at a ceremony in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday, October 18, to be held during ScienceWriters2014, a meeting jointly organized by CASW and the National Association of Science Writers (NASW).
Max Bothwell may be a leading expert on a pervasive algae known as "rock snot," but when a Canadian Press reporter asked for an interview with the government fisheries scientist, the request went down the rabbit hole of government bureaucracy. In the end, there were "110 pages of emails to and from 16 different federal government communications operatives," but no interview. One page hinted at the reason: "Blooms are the result of global climate change factors."
For Paris Review, Katie Roiphe coaxes some thoughts on reporting from a reluctant Janet Malcolm, author of The Journalist and the Murderer: "I learned the same truth about subjects that the analyst learns about patients: they will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener; just as ('good enough') analysts are interchangeable, so are journalists."
Tabitha M. Powledge raises questions — her own and others — about the bloodstained shawl that supposedly proves Jack the Ripper was an immigrant Polish baker named Aaron Kosminski: "Any decent TV defense attorney would rip the shawl to shreds. It must contain dozens of DNA deposits from the many people who have handled it in the past century and a quarter." Also in her weekly blogs roundup, more bad stuff turns up in government labs, and picking a Rosetta landing site.
Paige Brown Jarreau discovered she had a "secret weapon" for dealing with her PhD exams — she could write fast, because she blogs: "If I could recommend one study tip for students out there, especially students in journalism and mass communication programs, and particularly graduate students, it would be this: blog. Blog on a weekly basis about your course readings, interesting applications from your classes, or even news items you see related to what you are learning."
Journalism can be maddeningly ephemeral. Days to months of reporting produce articles that spend a few weeks on the newsstand or just hours on a website’s home page. Then, poof! Old stories get buried by new ones. Readers are lost before they even had a chance to lay their eyes on what you wrote. It doesn’t have to be that way, says David Wolman, a freelancer in Portland, Ore., who has compiled a selection of his own articles and a few book chapters into a re-mastered collection that he has self-published digitally
The National Association of Science Writers is pleased to announce the five winners of this year's Science in Society awards, which honor investigative or interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society. Read more to meet the 2014 winning authors and read their work.