From the Science Writers' Handbook website comes a story about a writer who finished her story — and then got an unacceptable contract: "I'd heard of this practice," Robin Mejia writes. "But it had never happened to me before, and I'm embarrassed to admit I was surprised. I want to say that I assumed our initial email exchange was my contract … but the truth is that in my excitement to start the story, I didn't really think about it at all."
Science writing news
Nieman Storyboard annotates a classic Roger Angell story about Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass — a World Series hero in 1971, an All-Star in 1972, and an utter flop after that: "I didn't know Steve Blass. I may have met him at the World Series. I probably called him up and said, 'This is Roger Angell,' and told him he was going through something unique in the history of baseball. 'I'd like to write a story about it.' And he said, 'Come on over.'"
Tabitha M. Powledge rounds up reviews of Nate Silver's new 538 site and finds little that's good. But she holds out hope for improvement: "Having been through a number of startup pub launches myself … I caution against issuing final judgements about 538 in the first wretched days, or weeks, or even months. I can tell you from experience that if it looks as if the folks at 538 are making it up as they go along, that's because they are. It's what you do at a startup."
Could you go to jail for publishing information that you find online? Panelists at a recent data journalism conference said that's exactly what could happen under some interpretations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Caroline O'Donovan writes: "Ultimately, the conventional wisdom seems to be that reporters hoping to stay out of court should be very upfront about their intentions, conservative in their judgments, and confident in the value of what they're doing."
Jesse Hicks peers behind the online encyclopedia's curtain and finds automation: "As Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, so has the task of quality control; today that responsibility falls to a cadre of cleverly programmed robots and 'cyborgs' — software-assisted volunteers who spend hours patrolling recent edits." Also, Chris Mooney on the personality traits of Internet trolls: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism.
In The Soil Will Save Us, Kristin Ohlson tells how plants and soil microorganisms created our lush world, how humans disrupted that partnership, and how visionary scientists, farmers, and other land managers are working to create healthy, carbon-rich soil to restore ecological health.
Why did it take the Environmental Protection Agency almost a week to answer questions about that West Virginia chemical spill? Two staffers from the Society of Environmental Journalists pose that question in a critique of the agency's press practices. Meanwhile, two other journalism organizations issue a report saying that PIOs increasingly "require pre-approval for interviews, decide who reporters get to interview and often monitor interviews."
In Slate, Amanda Hess recounts the story of Christine Fox, whose tweets about rape-victim blaming were republished by Buzzfeed. The problem? Twitter, Hess writes, gives reporters "a direct line to random acts of advocacy and casual expressions of bigotry. The new, virtual man on the street doesn't even need to be aware of a reporter's existence in order to turn up on a highly trafficked news source with name, photo, and social media contact information embedded."
At first he was put off by the advice he got from a film executive, John Capouya writes on Nieman Storyboard. But as he worked on his biography of the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, he began to learn what makes movies work: "The way screenwriters understand, exploit and tweak these elements can help us tell compelling true stories that, at least at first, don't appear on-screen. There's real craft, and real craft lessons, in the stories that unfold in the dark.