The used bookstore may be a thing of the past, and so may the legal principle behind it — that once a physical work is sold, it may then be resold without violating its creator's copyright. CJR's Sarah Laskow writes about efforts to extend that practice to digital media, and what that means to both creators and consumers: "As scholars and advocates look at reforming copyright law, updating the first sale doctrine could be one of the more contentious issues."
Science writing news
The evolutionary theorist had some profound, if less heralded, insights into language, Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings: "What set us apart from animals, he argued, was a matter of degree, not kind — a greater ability to produce sounds and ideas, an expression of our higher mental powers. Where humans differ from other animals, Darwin believed, is simply in our greater capacity to put together sounds with ideas, which is a function of our higher mental powers."
James Gilbert discusses a finding that charges of financial bias reduce the public's faith in even the soundest scientific research: "The more high profile these arguments become, the more people get used to the possibility of a giant scientific plot fuelled by career-protecting scientists, and the further their trust in scientific findings, however unanimous, is eroded. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that strictly balanced media over-represent minority views."
Whether we are trying to figure out how to avoid participating in a “trust fall” activity at an office team-building event or debating how much our key stakeholders trust the scientific information that they see in the media, trust is a recurring theme in our professional lives. With all of the time our community spends focusing on trust, we thought it would be worth exploring some recent research that can provide some insight into how issues of trust play out in science communication.
Colin Schultz turns out 12 posts a week for Smithsonian and that's less than half of his income, so each post is written in an hour or less. That's not enough time for telephone interviews, let alone in-person reporting. So Schultz focuses on analyzing rather than reporting the news: "There are lots of people out there trying to break news. What there are less of, and what you can actually do really well from behind a computer, is help people make sense of the news."
NASW member Kathleen Wong and colleagues tell the story of the University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS) and its mandate to provide outdoor classrooms, protect research sites, and conserve ecosystems for the people of California. Wong, a science writer at NRS, pulled the book together in only six months.
Five countries have dedicated science media centers, designed to improve the flow of science news to the press and public. Reviews on their performances are mixed, so it's no surprise that CJR's Curtis Brainard and NASW President Ron Winslow of the Wall Street Journal differ on whether the U.S. needs one too. Also: How Japan's center performed during Fukushima; and whether the U.K. center really helps journalists.
Everybody knows there's a "fair use" exception in U.S. copyright law, but how many people know how to apply it? The solution, media lawyer Jonathan Peters writes for PBS Mediashift is a new report from American University: "The report identifies seven principles that represent the shared opinion of journalists in evaluating what is 'fair' in their field, and each principle correlates with a situation commonly encountered by journalists."
Stephen Burt makes a case in Nieman Reports that journalism and poetry are as similar as they are different: "Many of the supposed oppositions between poems and news just dissolve on scrutiny: Poetry often reacts to public events; poetry can be pellucid (as in Louise Glück or Christina Rossetti) as well as opaque; and journalists can take on complicated ideas with specialized vocabulary (collateralized mortgage obligations, for example, or mitochondrial DNA)."