By Robin Mejia
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.
Oct. 31, 2007By Hannah Hoag
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.
Oct. 29, 2007By Jane Neff Rollins
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.
Oct. 29, 2007By Kevin Begos
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.
Oct. 29, 2007By Amy Maxmen
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?
Oct. 29, 2007By Michele Zacks
The lead in: balance in freelance?
Oct. 29, 2007By Kevin Begos
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.
Oct. 26, 2007Jerry E. Bishop, 76, former deputy news editor for science, technology, and medicine for the Wall Street Journal, died October 26, after a long fight against lung cancer. He was a NASW member for 45 years, a former editor of ScienceWriters, and past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Oct. 26, 2007By Emma Marris
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. Oct. 23, 2007