Liz Neeley draws inspiration from an atypical source: the comedian Jon Stewart. In particular, the artist and Story Collider executive director enjoys reliving a moment in 2006 when Stewart appeared on the television show Crossfire. “Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys,” Stewart told hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. “You need to stop hurting America.”
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Bird flu in Southeast Asia, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, infections transferred in hospitals and AIDS in the rural south. Facts are only part of these stories. When told from the perspective of the people impacted by the facts, science stories come alive and may even catalyze change.
After the briefest of encounters with legalese, I feel two things: happiness about having never become a lawyer, and gratitude towards anyone who will explain it to me in straightforward terms.
If there was one take-home message from the workshop on Covering Controversies, it might be that science journalists have the obligation to investigate whether something is a legitimate controversy — and if it’s not, the obligation to avoid covering it at all.
What makes a good editor and how do you become one? In a packed room at the annual NASW conference, four science editors discussed that question, as well as an editor’s duties, the relationship between editors and writers, and the ethical challenges editors regularly face.
After Melinda Wenner Moyer’s son was diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, she wrote an article called “My Son Has a Disorder that May Not Exist” for Scientific American Mind. She struggled, though, with whether to include her actual son and their family’s actual story. While their experiences were the motivation for exploring this topic, she worried that he could later be discriminated against because of the article (or mocked by his peers when they learned how to Google). In the end, she and her editors decided to use his real identity in the print version but an alias in the immortal online text.
From starting your own podcast to self-publishing an e-book, sometimes a science writer just feels the need to go it alone. Although it can be a challenge to make such ventures turn a profit, they can be worthwhile, said panelists during a session titled "DIY publishing — Does it yield?" held during the Science Writers 2015 Conference in Cambridge, Mass.
We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Science in Society Journalism Awards, sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers.
The winner of the 2015 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, is Madhumita Venkataramanan, now head of technology coverage for the Telegraph in London. Venkataramanan received the award and its $1,000 prize for two stories in Wired (“My Identity for Sale” and “Welcome to BrainGate”) and one story for the BBC (“The Superpower Police Now Use to Tackle Crime.”)