The Chicago Tribune's Kevin Pang decided his story about a Chicago chef and his new restaurant might work as well on video as in print.
Science writing news
Tabitha M. Powledge discusses coverage of two papers on genetic recoding, a technique that moves beyond modifying the genome and into creating entirely new organisms: "The technique’s virtues have been demonstrated so far only in the lab. But there are giddy speculations about the potential for oil-spill cleanup microbes that could be dismissed from the planet the moment their work was done." Also, what the Disneyland outbreak means for the anti-vaccine movement.
Some Twitter users don't like it when you retweet a compliment, Adam Sternbergh writes: "This social dilemma is of particular salience to that solipsistic corner of Twitter populated by people who use Twitter, at least partially, as an implicit form of self-promotion: People who also write articles or books or songs or plays, or who otherwise have some sort of artistic or charitable or commercial pursuit that they would like to tastefully bring to your attention."
Dianna Wray, a Houston Press staff writer, dug into court records for an award-winning story on non-profit and public hospitals that sue poverty-stricken patients for unpaid bills, and Joseph Burns examines her process in a post for the Association of Health Care Journalists: "Wray’s article is a good place to start for anyone covering how nonprofit and public hospitals are suing the uninsured and other patients with few resources to pay for expensive medical care."
Gary Schwitzer's resuscitated HealthNewsReview.org has hit the ground running with posts criticizing reporters (in two examples last week) for confusing correlation with causation regarding coffee drinking and melanoma occurrence, or Twitter use and heart disease: "It’s a story of the type we see increasingly – apparently based entirely on a news release with no independent vetting of claims, and misinterpretation of those claims that were made by the researchers."
How hard is it to make a living as a writer? It's so hard, Ann Bauer writes, that a lot of writers have undisclosed sources of income — an inheritance, maybe, or a spouse with a well-paying full-time job with benefits: "Those with privilege and luck don’t want the riffraff knowing the details. After all, if 'those people' understood the differences in our lives, they might revolt. Or, God forbid, not see us as somehow more special, talented and/or deserving than them."
Even if you've never thought about ordering some lightweight fake boulders for your front lawn, the newly bankrupt SkyMall might have had something you could use as a working journalist, Kristen Hare writes: "In honor of SkyMall, here are five things journalists actually could have used from the magazine." For example. there's the iDream3 Eye & Head Massager: "Co-workers might think you’re testing out Oculus Rift or HoloLens. But you’ll be getting an eyeball massage."
The master of Russian literature held himself to account daily in "an experimental project aimed at exploring the nature of self: the links connecting a sense of self, a moral ideal, and the temporal order of narrative," Irina Paperno writes. A March 1851 excerpt: "At home did not study English (insufficient firmness). At the Volkonskys’ was unnatural and distracted, and stayed until one in the morning (distractedness, desire to show off, and weakness of character)."
In his State of the Union speech, the president touted a "Precision Medicine Initiative," and Tabitha M. Powledge joins other bloggers in wondering what he meant: "Maybe he was talking about what is usually called personalized medicine, with diagnosis and treatment based on a patient’s genetic makeup?" If so, she writes, "Obama’s use of 'precision' rather than 'personalized' signals a decision by somebody somewhere that 'precision medicine' is now the official label."