It’s vital that you assume greater responsibility for your financial future. Don’t rely exclusively on paid advisers. At the very least, become knowledgeable enough to raise good questions and evaluate answers when dealing with professionals. The informed client gets the best advice.
Science writing news
The winner of the 2014 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, is Azeen Ghorayshi. Ghorayshi received the award and its $1,000 prize for “Bio Hackers,” a story in the East Bay Express about the “small but growing community of hackers, tinkerers and off-hours science enthusiasts” who are genetically engineering organisms in their garages and basements; and “Choking to Death in Tehran,” a story in Newsweek about smog in Iran.
Frank Rose isn't buying the doom-and-gloom predictions that the decline of print means the death of journalism as we know it. In fact, he sees signs that it's doing quite nicely online: "For every fledgling enterprise like Circa, which generates slick digests of other people's journalism on the theory that that's what mobile readers want, you have formerly short-attention-span sites like BuzzFeed and Politico retooling themselves to offer serious, in-depth reporting."
"In May of 1839," Maria Popova writes, "Herman Melville found himself riveted by an article in the New York monthly magazine The Knickerbocker about a 'renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers' — a formidable albino whale named Mocha Dick." What happened after that is well known, but Popova adds to the backstory with some illustrations from a new "picture-book biography" on the real-life whale that captivated Melville.
Few recent stories about the so-called "hobbit" fossils have mentioned their long backstory, Tabitha M. Powledge writes: "Most news stories treated the new studies as an entirely novel and startling bolt from the blue. I know I should probably cut today's journalists a bit of slack because they are operating under frantic constraints of time and space. But it's distressing that hardly any bothered with the dead-simple step of googling LB1's history. Or even Wikipedia."
Regarding a White House video linking global warming to wildfires, Charlie Petit argues that reporters need to break the habit of saying that no single event can be tied to climate change: "As journalists, we don't have to ape public speakers if they trot out such fuzzy thinking. If weather and climate are different, this way of stressing the distinction only feeds confusion and may backfire. What does it mean, we can't blame any single weather event on climate change?"
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."
It may be all the rage in journalism, but longform storytelling places some unusual demands on the writers, editors, and other people who are trying to produce it, Lauren Rabaino writes in a report on the SRCCON conference: "Use longform storytelling to engage people with your site and draw them into other content. Because the content is so high-touch and bound to get attention, use that as an opportunity to draw readers into other places on the site and hook them."
Authors who think writing is their only duty and don't work on building a brand are headed for failure, Joel Friedlander writes: "Branding should be part and parcel of the business plan you write when you first get the idea for a book. In fact, that idea for your first book quickly should be followed by a brainstorming session for spin-off books, or sequels or series, and a big-picture view of who you want to be and how you want to be known when you become an author."