Congratulations to the twenty NASW travel fellows selected for a grant to attend ScienceWriters2013 Nov. 1-5 in Gainesville, Florida. Check the full post for a list of recipients. Thank you to all who applied. We had a record setting number of applications.
Science writing news
Lane DeGregory is a Pulitzer-winning Tampa Bay Times feature writer and the reported author of this email to a journalism student asking for advice from the experienced: "When I was starting out, my editor often told me what the story was about before I ever went out to report it, so I tried to tailor my questions and observations and even the writing to what I thought the editor wanted. But the story you set out to get isn’t always the story that’s really there."
From web searches to driverless cars, Google's fingerprints are all over our lives. Now, it wants us to live longer, Tabitha M. Powledge writes in her weekly roundup. Coverage of the Calico project on "the challenge of aging and associated diseases" was short on details, but shouldn't be dismissed, she writes: "It’s not bonkers to think that Calico, with its unlimited funds and access to very good brains, might accomplish fine things even if death remains with us."
Who decides what scientific research makes the news? Science writers, of course. Rachel Bernstein reviews a recent study on how well they're doing: "Editors from the New England Journal of Medicine found that reporters actually do a pretty good job covering the most important papers, at least when choosing among those published in their journal." But she adds that it may be time for writers to broaden their sources beyond high "impact factor" journals like NEJM.
Health journalists John Fauber, a medical investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Joanne Silberner, a freelance multimedia journalist and former National Public Radio correspondent, are the recipients of the 2013 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.
In Astronomy 101, Carolyn Collins Petersen brings the seemingly out-of-reach down to earth, providing basic facts and a contemporary perspective on discoveries about dark matter, the big bang, extraterrestrial life, and more.
While it's an easy way to call attention to a story, it's often inaccurate, or at least out of context, Paige Brown writes. Brown reviews recent news stories that used the word, especially in headlines, when it wasn't supported by the underlying science and sometimes not even by the text of the story itself: "I’d propose that science journalists should rarely if ever use this language to describe a finding, short of the researcher calling it so him- or herself."
Nieman Storyboard and The Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger discuss line-by-line his Outside story that later became a book and movie. Here's Junger on reconstructing an event that none of the participants survived: "And I didn’t want to fictionalize, obviously, because I considered myself a journalist. But I'd read a book called The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, and he'd do this thing where he'd say, 'Maybe he took a walk' or 'Maybe he watched the sunset.'"
Just two weeks before the most significant ACA deadline arrives, Tabitha M. Powledge aggregates resources for reporters covering the Oct. 1 opening of the act's insurance exchanges, and reviews the latest in the political battle over its funding: "It is perilously close to causing the U.S. government to close on the day those insurance exchanges open." Also: Does climate change help accouont for recent instability in the Middle East? Plus other science blog highlights.