It's not "Join the conversation" or "Like us on Facebook" or even "Forgot your password?" but another common expression that sums up the Internet experience, Matthew J.X. Malady writes in the New Republic: "If 'Your an idiot!' doesn't ring a bell, then you probably don't use the Internet all that much. (Also: You should count yourself as lucky and be sure to proceed through the remainder of your life exactly as you have up to this point.) You, my friend, are no idiot."
Science writing news
If a lot of people read your science stories, that means they're low in accuracy and the readers are low in knowledge. That in a nutshell is the theory proposed by Swedish physicist Sabine Hossenfelder in a post reviewed by Poynter's Andrew Beaujon. But the Knight Tracker's Faye Flam calls out Hossenfelder for some flaws in her pretty but "fishy" graphs: "The graphs do not appear to be based on any data. There is not a data point to be found."
Leaving Berkeley for New York after college, Joan Didion took a job writing captions at the fashion journal. Maria Popova quotes her about the routine there: "At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs."
Childhood obesity is declining, says the National Center for Health Statistics. But Tabitha M. Powledge thinks there's more to this story: "Greet these data with little glad cries, and hope madly that these kids, and those who come after, can continue to maintain healthful weight as they navigate through the crises of life. But absorb also the fact that it's at best a dent in the obesity statistics. As the paper points out, obesity hasn't declined in other age groups."
If your idea of data journalism is limited to spreadsheets, let Robert Aboukhalil introduce you to the wonders of the command line. Aboukhalil has step-by-step instructions, with screenshots, for downloading and analyzing a simple data set: "Anything you can do using your operating system's graphical interface can be done on the command line. Why bother then? It's often easier or faster to perform certain tasks on the Terminal than by clicking around with a mouse."
Things that make the news are often signals of a much larger problem, Pulitzer-winner Sally Kestin told a Poynter event featuring winners of four 2013 Pulitzer Prizes. Following up on the news with data and document research plus old-fashioned shoe-leather street reporting, the reporters hit pay dirt: "Other than that Pulitzer, the work of the seven people present Tuesday night didn't have much in common. But, for most, the processes they used to produce their work did."
Michelle V. Rafter offers some advice on deciding how much to charge for a blog post. Among her tips: "If you can crank out a 250-word post on a topic you know well in 30 minutes, the $50 fee is equal to $100 an hour – not shabby. If you're writing about a topic that you have to search or do multiple interviews for and you end up spending four hours, that same $50 comes out to $12.50 an hour, or about what my son earned as a lifeguard at the local public pool."
The IRS wants to help freelance writers and other owners of home-based businesses who take deductions for home offices. An accommodating agency announced that freelancers have the option to use new, simpler rules based on the size of their offices, starting with returns for calendar year 2013 that are filed in 2014. From the Winter 2013-14 ScienceWriters.
Lauren Kirchner writes in CJR about the latest developments in courtrooms across the nation, where bloggers are trying to gain the same protection from defamation actions as other news reporters. Plaintiffs and their lawyers are fighting back, and judges are divided: "Since New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964, media outlets have had a strong protection against defamation suits. But, in the parlance of our times, who is the media?"