Science writing news

The Nieman Foundation is marking its 75th anniversary, and Nieman Storyboard has collected its most popular posts on narrative writing. Here's Rebecca Skloot on the structure of her The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: "The story of the cells and what happened to Henrietta take on such a different weight if you learn about them at the same time that you’re learning about the science, the scientists and her family, what happened to them and where they are now."

The Obamacare web sites had trouble keeping up with demand when the health insurance exchanges went live on Tuesday. Is that a good or bad omen for its future? In her weekly science blogs roundup, Tabitha M. Powledge breaks down the polling data and concludes that the new health plans may be more popular than their opponents say. Also: the psychology behind the federal government's shutdown, and its effects on science, medicine, and coverage of both.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald had a legendary editor in Maxwell Perkins, who even got his own biography. But the days when publishing houses had editors who edited are long gone, Marjorie Braman writes in Publishers Weekly: "A publisher once said to me, almost in passing, 'We don't pay you to edit.' The real message was: 'Editing is not crucial. If you're an editor, what matters is acquiring.'" Braman now works as a freelance editor and says that model may be the future.

"Journalists by and large never want to be pitched on Facebook," Zoe Fox writes. "Journalists, especially ones who consider their Twitter account to be an extension of their reporting, want to maintain some semblance of privacy on Facebook." That's among the social media etiquette tips Fox offers for PR/PIO people who want to get their message out. Among others: Never send your pitch to a reporter's personal email accounts, and no more than one followup per pitch.

The winners of the 2013 Science in Society Journalism Awards, sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers, are: In the Book category, David Quammen; in the Science Reporting category, Douglas Fox; in the Longform category, Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne; in the Science Reporting for a Local or Regional Audience category, Hillary Rosner; and in the Commentary or Opinion category, Christie Aschwanden.

Sarah Kolb-Williams titles her post "10 Ways to Fake a Professional Edit," but it's really more about using professional editing techniques to improve your own copy. For example, she warns to be mindful of the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes: "Some authors use hyphens as a catch-all dash-but as you can see here, the hyphen confounds. There’s no such thing as a 'dash-but,' and it takes a few runs through the previous sentence to catch the syntax."