Spending four years or more in a PhD program is enough to make some budding scientists think about other options. A popular one is science communication, Becky Ham writes in a post on "don't get caught." "Why does science writing sound so good?" she asks. "I think it’s because most scientists want to share their research. And new scientists haven’t given up on the idea that they’re allowed to talk to everyone — not just their peers — about what they’re doing."
Miscellaneous
Cutting off Wikileaks' access to credit card processors. Enlisting the government to help police copyright. Giving their own content more favorable access to their networks. These are just some of the ways technology companies are impeding free speech, Dan Gillmor writes in Columbia Journalism Review. Gillmor also discusses how journalists need to upgrade their technological skills and equipment to protect their sources from government prosecutors or worse.
Hillary Rosner bemoans the fact that all of this year's American Society of Magazine Editors awards finalists were men. In this pair of blog posts she says that magazines aimed at women avoid long narratives: "Guess what, women’s mags: I’m a woman, and I have a really busy life, and I read magazine stories longer than 1000 words. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Does anyone else find this attitude incredibly offensive toward women?"
Anything on the popular Last Word on Nothing site, according to a post by Heather Pringle: "Currently, the Last Word on Nothing.com is persona non grata in China, blocked from its millions of computers. The country’s Great Firewall — the massive internet censorship operation masterminded by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing — has risen up against us and struck our website down." She also explains how to tell if your site is blocked.
"Only 14% of second-class male passengers escaped, so he certainly managed to beat the odds, and if he hadn't done so I wouldn't be here now," Nicholas Wade said of his grandfather, Lawrence Beesley, who survived 100 years ago today as the great ship sank. Bessley wrote a book about the tragedy. Wade reads excerpts for The Economist and writes in the New York Times about his own questions, one century later, about his ancestor's actions.
Meredith Cochie put a quite a show at a recent SPJ conference with her advice for students, Dan Reimold writes on College Media Matters. For example, take the "overzealous student who politely and repeatedly accosted her with business cards and clips and questions about job prospects ... Some of his early approaches were a bit abrupt and artless, but his overall persistence and speak-to-strangers-in-positions-of-power courage enabled him to earn a name for himself."
Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg talked with students at Columbia recently and Allan Kustanovich reported some highlights in Womens Wear Daily: "We hate quotations at Slate. We almost never use quotes. They don’t do anything. They waste the readers’ time. Only use quotes when you can’t say it better yourself." Also, "I’m against fact-checking because I think it encourages error. The items I’ve made mistakes in are when I’ve been fact-checked."
An MIT panel recently batted that question around, and Andrew Phelps has a summary on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. The answer may be yes, Phelps writes, but with caveats — including who does the labelling and who reads them: "Descriptive labels, rather than prescriptive labels, connote truth. But who is to determine the ingredients of a news story? And if we know how much of our news intake is opinion, celebrity gossip, and fluff, will that change our behavior?"
For Richard Harris, a longtime NPR reporter and former NASW president, a paralyzed vocal cord became fodder for a post about his sudden illness, its diagnosis, and — one now hopes — its cure: "Being a science reporter, of course I dived into the medical literature to see what was up. It turns out that good statistics are hard to come by on how frequently Americans suffer from this condition, unilateral vocal fold paralysis." With recordings before, during, and after.
It looked as if aggregation and social networking would render editors obsolete. But in this Sparksheet post, Karyn Campbell says professional editors are poised for a comeback: “The web has become too big and noisy,” she writes. “While algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all."