Coverage of NASW's Fall 2007 Annual Meeting
The annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers was in Spokane, Wash., Oct. 19-20, 2007. This page contains reports from many of the sessions, filed by NASW conference travel fellows.
Must Choosing Terms Mean Choosing Sides?
Choosing terms; it's something science writers do every day, sometimes with careful thought, sometimes in the last minutes before deadline. This panel at the 2007 NASW annual meeting challenged writers to use care when choosing terms and constructing analogies to describe contentious science, noting that if writers don't think through their choices, they may well be letting interest groups do it for them.
Sold in 60 seconds
Back by popular demand, the pitch slam drew a full room of freelancers eager to pitch their ideas to a prominent panel of editors from New Scientist, Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times and High Country News. Each publication relies on freelancers to fill front-of-the-book news stories, features, and other departments.
Inside Book Contract Preparation and Negotiation
At the 2007 NASW Science and Society meeting in Spokane, Wash., an audience of about 30 science writers benefited from the inside knowledge of two speakers about the process of negotiating a book contract with a traditional publishing house.
October 29, 2007 08:03 PM — Continue readingScience writing in Arab nations
The NASW Annual meeting in Spokane was honored to have members of the Arab Science Journalists Association as guests, and they presented a fascinating view of writing about science in another culture.
Science and the New "Graphic Journalism"
Science was borne from observation and continues to rely on new ways of seeing phenomena. If it's such an innately visual practice, why has science been so difficult to illustrate?
Reinventing Your Freelance Science Writing Career — the apprentice view
The lead in: balance in freelance?
October 29, 2007 07:50 PM — Continue readingWrestling Giant Topics
We've all been there: struggling to find a narrative, lede or metaphor to make a complicated science story understandable to the general public. Writers Michael D. Lemonick and Michael Shermer tried to explain their methods at a NASW 2007 Session, but in some cases left the audience wishing for more details.
Technology Outside the Box
At a session filled with video clips, multimedia web surfing and, yes, someone muttering at the display computer "I am a Mac person. How do you ... ," panelists at the "21st Century Science Writing: New Tools for Thinking Outside the Box" session of this year's NASW meeting talked blogs, YouTube, Facebook and online gambling. Each panelist presented a case study or two of how they use new technologies to tell stories better and faster.
October 24, 2007 01:02 AM — Continue readingPerfect Pitch
NASW took place as baseball's best were on the verge of a World Series — and players and writers alike worked to perfect their pitches.
October 23, 2007 04:55 AM — Continue readingTaming the Digital Office
The speakers at "Taming the Digital Office" would find it odd, perhaps even perverse, that I'm drafting this story using pen and paper. My work style is clearly very different from that of the computer-savvy members of the panel.
October 23, 2007 04:47 AM — Continue readingE.coli to Con Agra: Deconstructing the food, wine, and agribusiness industries
Session organizer and freelancer Karyn Hede designed this session for the 2007 NASW Science in Society meeting to spotlight intersections between food, wine, and science, and to suggest new story ideas in this field. As she noted, food safety stories have important science elements. For example, the nationwide outbreak of E. Coli 0157:H7 in 2006 that was traced to California spinach raised questions about how to avoid similar contamination and how often produce should be tested.
October 23, 2007 04:34 AM — Continue readingPR Stays True to Science
Science writers are in the business of communicating real, worthwhile, exciting science — working either as science journalists or public information officers. It's not about the job title; it's about communicating new scientific discoveries to the intended audience.
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