Some people have declared the end of interns, but former Washingtonian editor Jack Limpert begs to differ. Limpert writes that former interns comprised a third to a half of his magazine's staff: "When you’re looking for good people, it’s one thing to look at resumes and clips and interview someone for an hour; having that someone in the office for three or four months tells you a lot more about what kind of journalist he or she might be."
Science writing news
Apoorva Mandavilli went to ScienceWriters2013 and saw lots of people who looked nothing like her, and that may harm science journalism, she writes in Matter: "If you’re a young, white science journalist with good taste in eyeglass frames and dirty-blond hair, congratulations! You could have walked into any conversation in any room at the conference and felt instantly at home. I was born and raised in India, and look the part, so I wasn’t engaged in any mirroring."
A story by an Indiana University student contains lessons that established writers would do well to remember, Kristen Hare writes for Poynter. Jessica Contrera saw a sign in a Waffle House announcing its imminent closure, and turned it into a story about the lives of some of its longtime customers, its owner, and the community around it: “Those little details that some people would just call color?” Contrera said. “Those are what make people connect with it.”
Astronomers studying data from the Kepler spacecraft now estimate there may be four billion Earth-like planets just in our Milky Way galaxy, Tabitha M. Powledge writes in her science blogs roundup. But how many of those planets have what we would consider intelligent life, and why haven't we heard anything from them? Also, a guest post by Beryl Benderly on a panel discussion on women in science writing at last weekend's ScienceWriters annual meeting.
NASW member Sharon Guynup teamed up with National Geographic photographer Steve Winter to illuminate the lives of the world’s endangered tiger population.
The first conference reports from travel fellowship winners at ScienceWriters2013 have now been posted on our past events page. Sessions covered so far include "Online and offline tools for mastering your workflow," and "Rising above the noise: Using statistics-based reporting." We'll have more reports and videos in coming days. Also, if you have photos to donate (with credit) to our online albums, please send them to cybrarian@nasw.org.
When in doubt, get permission. That's the essence of a CJR post by Sarah Laskow, who covered a session on the subject at the recent Online News Association conference. Attendees heard from two attorneys who outlined what's covered by fair use, and what's uncertain about it: "Copyright law wasn’t designed only to help creators make money; fair use provisions help guarantee that other people can criticize, teach, or transform existing work. But it’s not a fail-safe."
Tommy Tomlinson analyzes another country music classic, the story of a cowboy, a beautiful woman, and a murder in a west Texas town: "Rhythm and sentence length are key to making this song work. The full sentences imply an epic story; the galloping rhythm (11 syllables followed by 10, sung in ¾ time) makes it feel much shorter. Robbins’ record label, worried that the song was too long for the radio, released an edited version. Fans demanded the long version instead."
Tabitha M. Powledge calls the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database PubMed the "single basic irreplaceable tool for research in the life sciences." In her weekly blogs roundup, she discusses the new PubMed Commons, which allows comments on journal abstracts. There's good news and bad in this, Powledge writes: It's a clear step forward for post-publication peer review, but the system tightly restricts who can register and comment.