Few people would assume that starting a publication is easy. But the take-home message of Saturday afternoon’s session on the topic drove home just how taxing the process can be. “It will leave you nerve-wracked and reaching for sedatives,” said panelist Bobbie Johnson, co-founder of the online publication Matter, which has been publishing long-form articles about science, technology, medicine and the environment since November 2012.
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Sunday morning began as sweetly as the late Lou Reed’s until Maryn McKenna stepped in. Leave it to “scary disease girl” to scare a captive audience with a panel on pandemics. Grab a raisin danish and tune into a talk about a new SARS-like virus sweeping Saudi Arabia and cholera in Haiti.
There is no magic secret for writers when it comes to organizing your materials and time but there are a number of tools that could help, said panelists at NASW’s session on “Online and Offline Tools for Mastering Your Workflow.”
A panel of freelance journalists including moderators Rose Eveleth and Rachel Nuwer, and Charles Choi, Virginia Hughes, and Melinda Wenner Moyer reviewed results from a 2013 survey of science writers.
An image of a man with pink scars running up and down the inside of his arm flits across the screen. A used heroin needle rests on the sink next to him. “Addiction is one of the most stigmatized and not spoken about complications,” said Cassie Rodenberg, a Scientific American blogger and science teacher at a South Bronx middle school. “These are the people who are ignored.”
What makes the writer-editor relationship work? In a frank discussion between freelance writers, staff editors and a highly participatory audience, the “Working with Editors” session at the annual NASW meeting focused on the relationship forged after an assignment commission.
During the late afternoon session of the NASW workshop “Rising above the noise: using statistics-based reporting,” moderated and organized by Kathleen Raven, an expert panel of statisticians and journalists discussed using statistics to assess the validity and impact of new scientific research findings.
Like most freelancers, Alla Katsnelson and Amy Maxmen struggle with blurry lines. “It’s not clear how hard and fast are the rules” of freelancer ethics, Katsnelson opened. “How and when do you disclose conflicts of interest when pitching?” Often each situation is a judgment call and may be handled by editors and publications in different ways.
It wasn’t a review of the latest news in cosmology or a lesson on how underweight folks could put on pounds, but “Take a Lesson from the Universe: Expand” did provide a valuable session for science writers, editors and PIOs looking to broaden their communication outreach to non-scientists.