Coaxing a reluctant subject into cooperating when you're writing a profile can take more time than the reporting, Lisa DePaulo writes, before offering some of her own tips for turning a no or maybe into a yes: "I always tell profile subjects: The more time you give me, the less time I’ll spend calling everyone you ever knew. When a subject cooperates, the piece is more empathetic. I have never totally trashed someone who cooperated. That is something publicists don’t get."
Science writing news
Lincoln Michel riffs on a tweet by author Elizabeth McCracken and asks what it would be like if people talked to other professionals the way they talk to writers: "Strangers seem very willing to offer career advice … or to oddly ask you to guess what work they've read in their life and if any of yours is among it." So here's an icebreaker for your next social event: "Gastroenterologist? My aunt tried to be a gastroenterologist. Hard to make a living doing that!"
A spreadsheet leaked to Gawker's Hamilton Nolan suggests that newly spun-off Time Inc. rates writers, in part, on how "beneficial" their work is to advertiser relationships: "Would you believe that this once-proud magazine publishing empire is now explicitly rating its editorial employees based on how friendly their writing is to advertisers?" More from Nieman Journalism Lab, and a Time Inc. reply from Norman Pearlstine.
Life can be hectic for an award-winner writer. Ask Dan Fagin, whose book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (Bantam Books) was honored in a doubleheader on May 28. First, came presentation of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, at a luncheon at Columbia University. This was followed that evening by receipt of the New York Public Library’s 2014 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
There once was a time, children, when you consumed news in a few well-organized ways — a daily newspaper, a nightly news broadcast, an hourly radio update. Now, the flow is constant and you have to organize it yourself, Jihii Jolly writes: "In the same way that financial literacy requires knowing how money works and the most effective methods for managing it, news literacy requires familiarity with how journalism is made and with the most effective ways to consume it."
If you think blogs are dead, eclipsed by social media platforms, you'll get an argument from Dan Kennedy, who says that having an independent online presence remains essential for most journalists: "The reason is that you need an online home that is controlled by you — not by Mark Zuckerberg or Arianna Huffington or some other digital mogul seeking to get rich from your content. Moreover, you need to establish an online identity. If you don’t, others will do it for you."
Hamilton Nolan thinks so and he writes about what happens when too many editors take their turns with a story: "If you believe that having four editors edit a story produces a better story than having one editor edit a story, I submit that you have the small mind of a middle manager, and should be employed not in journalism but in something more appropriate for your numbers-based outlook on life, like carpet sales." A response from Jack Limpert.
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.
If PSA screening reduces the death rate from prostate cancer by 20%, why is there so much debate about the test's effectiveness? It's because that one number doesn't tell the whole story, Tabitha M. Powledge writes. A more realistic interpretation of the latest results from the European study of routine PSA screening, she writes, would describe the benefit for an average middle-aged man as a drop in risk from about 3% to about 2.4%. Also, hyping the human microbiome.