It started when "my PhD imploded," Virginia Gewin writes about her introduction to the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship in an essay on the companion web site to the Science Writers' Handbook. Gewin, who spent her 10-week fellowship interning at the Oregonian, writes: "I proved to myself that I could find a story, get the details and write on deadline. Any doubts that this career would make good use of years of scientific training were gone."
Science writing news
In a provocative Embargo Watch post, Ivan Oransky draws a parallel between the current debate over national security leaks and the practice of embargo agreements for science news, which he calls "a case of journalists agreeing to let powerful institutions dictate terms of coverage in exchange for early access." In both cases, he writes, technology makes old practices obsolete. "If this comparison makes my science journalism colleagues — and me — uncomfortable, good."
The master of stark prose died last month, and right away the appreciations started appearing. Here are a few: Maria Popova reviews Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, and David Haglund goes over the exceptions and hedges. Poynter's Roy Peter Clark recounts his buffet-line conversation with Leonard about exclamation points. And Rick Anderson takes a stab at giving Goldilocks a Leonard makeover.
Steve Henn reports on NPR about a recent move by the New York Times to let Google handle the news organization's email: "This summer, the paper moved all of its reporters onto corporate Gmail accounts. Before the switch, Times emails were stored on servers it owned; now those messages are in Google's digital filing cabinet." Henn raises a question: How strong is Google's committment to protecting reporters — and confidential sources — from government subpoenas?
USA Today's Natalie DiBlasio takes aim at public relations professionals who fill her inbox with pitches but rarely get much for their effort. Here's number 7 on her top 10 list: "If every email you send me has a subject starting with 'New!' 'Breaking!' 'Please read' or 'Once-in-a-lifetime story if you just click' I might start to think you over-exaggerate about your story’s newsworthiness. The delete key looks awfully tasty after a half-a-dozen of these a week."
Joel Friedlander writes on The Book Designer that too many bloggers neglect, benignly or otherwise, their calling card, the "About" page: "It’s your readers’ needs you should be thinking about when you write your About page. But it seems most bloggers have never thought about this. Instead, we get About pages that tell us where the blogger grew up, how they love to make caramel apples, who their favorite authors are, and that they love waterskiing with their dogs."
Our brains are hard-wired to make mistakes, Craig Silverman writes at Poynter, and that's why copyeditors are necessary — to protect writers from the errors that our brains inevitably make — or miss — as we write: "Editors often talk about coming at a piece of text with “fresh eyes” in order to see things in a different way. What this means … is that we have to hack our brains in order to get past innate blind spots and re-orient towards spotting mistakes."
David Roberts spent a decade at the online magazine Grist, but now he's taking a year off, having overdosed on social media: "I know I’m not the only one tweeting in the bathroom. I’m online so much that I’ve started caring about 'memes.' I feel the need to comment on everything, to have a 'take,' preferably a 'smart take.' The online world, which I struggle to remember represents only a tiny, unrepresentative slice of the American public, has become my world."
More than half of neuroscientists in the U.S. — and even more in Germany — stand by the idea that scientific journals shouldn't publish research that has already been reported in the news media, according to a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper cited by Ivan Oransky's Embargo Watch. Oransky writes that the paper "explains why scientists err on the side of conforming to a strict version of the rule that journals don’t even support anymore."