Nieman Storyboard has scanned Twitter and collected quotes from speakers at the recent Power of Narrative 2014 conference at Boston University. Here's Pulitzer winner and Mizzou professor Jacqui Banaszynski on interviewing: "My cardinal rule for interviewing: It's not about me … When interviewing, use artifacts or photos, ask framed questions, dare to ask, use multiple curiosities … Pay attention to smell, taste, details of the environment."
Science writing news
It may be the exoplanet most closely resembling earth, Tabitha M. Powledge writes, but that doesn't mean it supports life: "The question of atmosphere is pretty major. Kepler 186f is at the far edge of the star’s habitable zone. It gets only a third as much light as Earth, and it is colder." Also, why did so many reporters get correlation and causation confused — again — in writing about two studies linking marijuana use to heart problems and changes in the brain?
"Maybe you've heard the adage that if you've been searching for a particular book and haven't found it, that's the book you should write," Nina Amir writes on The Book Designer. Amir says that a "competitive analysis" should be the first step in planning a book, and she provides some tips for creating one, including some questions to ask: "Will my book improve upon the competition?" "Is my book unique?" "Is my book necessary — do my target readers need or want it?"
News sites that shun hyperlinks may be denying themselves valuable protection from defamation claims, Cindy Gierhart of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes on Poynter. Gierhart cites two court decisions in which links to other documents played key roles in shielding publishers from judgments: "Hyperlinking cannot put an end to all defamation claims. But given the recent court decisions, news media may want to rethink their hyperlinking strategy."
Ruth Ann Nordin heard that successful people often work only four to five hours per day, so she applied that standard to the writer's life. The key, Nordin writes, lies in setting priorities and sticking to them: "As a writer, the most important thing on your list should be writing one of your current projects. Whatever the word count is, try to get something written that day. Some people write on specific days … Just make sure that is the priority for those days."
Sarah Laskow writes in CJR about the all-too-common problem of freelance writers clashing with their editors. She lists some of the warning signs of a coming breakup and some tips on how to head it off: "Breakups are harder on writers than editors. So be wary of editors bearing too-good-to-be-true assignments. Get a contract; make sure it works as much in your favor as you can manage. Try to remember: As in love, in journalism, not all stories have happy endings."
Simply dumping your news releases into dozens of journalists' email inboxes is a quick ticket to their spam folders, Matt Shipman writes. But Shipman then lists three ways in which news releases can still be useful — on distribution sites like Newswise or EurekAlert, in "churnalism" sites like Phys.org, and in tailored pitches to individual writers: "I think mass email distribution is what is dead (or dying)," Shipman writes. "News releases are alive and well."
A screening jury nominated three candidates for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, but they all were passed over. Poynter's Roy Peter Clark offers some ideas about the reasons for the snub: "Something unfortunate and unintended happens any time the Pulitzer Board decides not to give a prize in a particular category … The lack of a winner in a category casts a pall on all the finalists, calling attention to their imagined deficiencies rather than their capacities."
Four leading lights of science wrote a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences editorial calling for an overhaul of U.S. biomedical research support, but there's little news in what they say, Tabitha M. Powledge writes: "The fact that the U.S. is creating an oversupply of scientists has been known for decades, at least to those who will listen. An NAS report from a committee (former Princeton University President Shirley) Tilghman chaired came out in 1998."