Nieman Storyboard asks Tommy Tomlinson, Stephen Henderson, Kelley Benham French, and Lisa Pollak to each pick five of their favorite narratives from the past year and explain what they liked so much about them. Here's French on “The Witness” by Pamela Colloff in Texas Monthly: "I’ve seen a man die by lethal injection, but not like this. Through the eyes of Michelle Lyons, who witnessed 278 Texas executions, we see the death penalty from both sides of the glass."
Science writing news
Did you see that story blaming two-thirds of cancer risk on bad luck rather than bad genes? Well, Bob O’Hara and GrrlScientist have some criticisms: "These headlines, and the stories, are just bollocks," they write. "The work, which is very interesting, showed no such thing." Their post explains that the study's authors were only trying to explain variation in cancer risk, not absolute risk: "[The data] says nothing about the proportion of cancers due to cell division."
Buzzfeed's Carolyn Kylstra talks to Ed Yong, Gary Schwitzer, and others for a listicle of red flags for bad health reporting, such as muddling correlation and causation, or considering a medical test's accuracy but not its specificity: "If a story only reports on accuracy but does not say anything about specificity, then you can be sure that you’re not getting all the information you need to make a fully informed judgment about how valuable the test is in real life."
Stephen J. A. Ward is interim director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen and he has some surprising things to say about how journalists present themselves to the world: "The plain truth is that journalists and news organizations are always advocating, interpreting and educating, not just reporting in some narrow sense. The important point is to identify the type of interpreting that constitutes good journalism, rather than deny that interpretation exists."
In the U.S. today, remains of some 40,000 individuals have yet to be identified. In The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber explores a subculture of amateur detectives, who strive to solve cold cases. Many do their legwork on the Internet. As one reviewer noted, it’s DIY CSI.
Rolling Stone’s discredited campus rape story wins Error of the Year from Poynter's Craig Silverman in his annual roundup of the year's most notable media missteps and corrections: "It should go down as one of the most cautionary tales of confirmation bias in journalism. It’s also an example of how to not to behave when your organization publishes a disastrous piece of reporting." Silverman contrasts the Rolling Stone-walling with mea culpas from Deadspin and io9.
Paige Brown Jarreau publishes some results from her recent survey of science bloggers and shows how their blog-reading habits have grouped them into communities. See the social-network map of responses here. Names of the blogs that won the most mentions from the more-than-600 survey participants are listed in larger type. Bloggers that most frequently reference each other, such as those focusing on climate or astronomy, are coded by color.
One year before The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote a letter to his editor about L’Affaire Lettuceberg, a book he had just completed: "This is going to be a hard letter to write … this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest." A satire based on a 1936 lettuce workers' strike, the book "was full of tricks to make people ridiculous," Steinbeck wrote. "I’m not ready to be a hack yet."
They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but that's what book buyers do when they read those short promotional snippets that can close a sale. Rami Ungar breaks down a blurb into its elements and explains how to put them together: "Generally blurbs are at most a paragraph or two, and give a brief idea to the reader what they can expect before they open up the book to read it. This brief idea is given in three parts: the explanation, the mystery, and the promise."