Karin Gillespie dreamed of being published in the Gray Lady, but when it finally happened, her big moment came and went in a New York minute. She writes about her experience on Writer Unboxed: "My initial motivation for writing the piece was to increase my platform and thus become cat nip for Big-Five editors. That didn't happen. What did happen was I heard from dozens of readers who passionately connected with my words. And, of course, that's ultimately why I write."
Science writing news
The Associated Press will start using computers to generate routine business stories, and Mathew Ingram thinks that's a good thing for both journalism and journalists: "By widening the pool of available reporters to include both amateurs and robots, we increase the amount of potential journalism being done," Ingram writes on GigaOM. "All it means is that as a professional journalist, you now have to make sure that you are better than a robot."
NPR and other organizations are warning journalists that their retweets will be seen as endorsements. Jack Shafer says the real issue is control: "The advent of a new communications technology like Twitter plays hell with the editorial guidelines at news organizations because it gives independent megaphones to reporters who ordinarily couldn’t be heard unless editors stamped their approval on their copy and sent it to the wire, the printer, or pushed it over the air."
Ben Yagoda samples 11 prominent writers in a Nieman Storyboard post about ending a long story: "With each word, sentence, and paragraph, the world of possibilities is constricted, until you find yourself with one more bit to write. Even if you haven’t painted yourself into an uncomfortable corner, you have to steer between being too obvious and too enigmatic. At the same time you feel you need to leave readers with something that will move them and stick with them."
Tabitha M. Powledge discusses the state of the science on whether certain birth-control methods prevent implantation: "The scientific consensus is … that nothing happening before implantation can be considered abortion because there is no pregnancy until after implantation. Unfortunately, that declared scientific consensus is seriously undermined by the fact that the FDA-required labels on these birth control methods warn that they may prevent implantation. Ooops."
Plenty, Alberto Cairo writes for Nieman Lab: "At first, the current popularity of the new wave of data journalism seemed to be a good antidote to the epidemic of hardball punditry and tomfriedmanism that has plagued the news for ages," Cairo writes, before accusing Vox and FIveThirtyEight of sins such as "Gladwellism — deriving grand theories from a handful of undersubstantiated studies" and misuse of proxy variables. More from Derrick Harris.
A new blood test for Alzheimer's disease is 87% accurate. That's a big story, right? Not so fast, according to the British NHS Choices site, which complained that none of the news coverage "reported the positive predictive value of the test. This reduces the impressive sounding 87% accurate figure to around the 50% level … giving the test the same predictive value as a coin toss." More from Gary Schwitzer, John Gever.
Spending time in a primatology research center gave Dennis Meredith insight into the behavior of chimpanzees, and honed his appreciation of legal, ethical, and emotional issues affecting their care. That experience, he says, helped shape his novel, Solomon’s Freedom.
Alexis Fitts and Nicola Pring write about a common dilemma in reporting on poverty — whether to ease a subject's suffering: Reporters "may consider their motives clear — to focus attention on societal problems in the hopes that they will be solved. But beyond the profession, the interpretation of motives and results when a (typically white) middle-class journalist presumes to tell the story of a poor family (often black or Latino) can be something quite different."