The once-popular blog aggregator is handing over control to National Geographic, less than a year after several prominent bloggers moved out in reaction to the site's questionable deal with Pepsi. Read much of the backstory at CJR's The Observatory, plus reaction and other comment from Paul Raeburn, John Travis, and Hank Campbell.
Science writing news
A “positive void coefficient” set off the runaway nuclear reaction, but its long-term effects remain open to debate, writes Roger Highfield in the Telegraph in the best retrospective so far. Other angles are explored in Der Spiegel, and the Washington Post, plus National Geographic, with photos of wildlife in the exclusion zone, and excerpts from an oral history.
Thinking about teaching science writing to undergrads? Find inspiration in these new syllabi from instructors at Cornell, Mount Holyoke, UC Santa Cruz, and elsewhere, collected by the NASW Education Committee.
Reviews and "buy now" links for eight new books have been posted in the ScienceWriters Bookstore, including the story of a renegade physician named Jean Denis, who transfused calf’s blood into one of Paris’s most notorious madmen in 1867 and was charged with murder, and two works on global climate change. Use the search box on the Bookstore page to buy these books or anything sold at Amazon.com. Your purchases through this site help fund NASW programs and services.
Where's the line between emailed press releases and emailed spam? Not where many PR professionals think, says Jason Falls on Social Media Explorer. If you email your press release to reporters who "do not know you and didn’t ask you to email them, you are — at most — introducing yourself. If you do anything more than that, you are spamming them," Falls said. Don't miss the ensuing battle in his comments section.
The Spring 2011 issue of ScienceWriters is now available for downloading in PDF format in the members area. Included is a story in which author Dennis Meredith shares his cash flow report. Also, the differences between science and journalism; lower self-employment taxes for 2011; and how science blogs could improve traditional science reporting.
Gary Taubes takes on another dietary foe: Sugar, he declares, is not just empty calories, it causes most of what ails us, even (maybe) cancer. The BP Gulf oil spill a year later: Still an oily residue. New guidelines on early diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease: What's the point, since there's no therapy?
A series of blog entries on the Secrets of Good Science Writing is running on The Guardian site to promote a new British science writing prize. Advice from Ian Sample: "Your job is to produce an article that is correct, clear and fascinating, that raises implications and proper doubts and leaves your readers grateful, whether they are the world's leading authority on the subject or, more likely, a passer-by who landed on your story by chance."
It wasn't just the stories that won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series, "One in a billion: A boy's life, a medical mystery." Videos, photos, graphics and other online features also impressed judges, Poynter's Al Tompkins writes. Also, at Nieman Storyboard, a review of Pulitzer winners who took a narrative approach, including links to their work.