The author of Hiroshima admitted only 12 students to his Yale seminar, but the knowledge dispensed there stayed with his students for life, Peter Richmond writes for Nieman Storyboard: “I won’t presume to be exact in recalling the first thing he said to us (this was 37 years ago), but I remember it being very close to this: 'If anyone in the room thinks of himself or herself as an artist, this is not a course for you. I teach a craft.'”
Science writing news
Could you get 36 blog posts out of a one-hour event? Denise Graveline did and she explains how on her Don't Get Caught site. The underlying message is simple — take advantage of every opportunity to generate content from whatever material you have available: "Wring every last bit of goodness out of the content you have already lying around. Most of my clients have more content than they know what to do with. No need to go out and create something newly spectacular."
The contraception debate gets legally weirder. Judges and the FDA don't agree on how the morning-after pill should be sold. The two-pill version is really one-step too. The health care system is a dumping ground for all our sexual anxieties. Michael Douglas, the poster child for HPV vaccination. An etymological aside on Latinate dirty words. A NASA video assures young gays that things will get better.
ScienceWriters columnist Julian Block answers questions from readers about the IRS rules for deducting expenses for conferences such as ScienceWriters2013 and whether an honorarium donated to charity is eligible for a deduction.
This month’s books explore the secret world of red wolves; the work of an influential and colorful, yet little known, 20th century physicist, George Gamow; astronomy science and the delights of amateur astronomy; and the natural world via sonnets written by a nature writer.
The gateway to many top-tier journalism jobs consists of working full-time for free in high-rent cities like New York and Washington. That's a problem, David Dennis writes in the Guardian, because it ensures that newsrooms are populated by children of privilege: "The practice of asking recent graduates to spend their days working for free while paying rent and living in a city like New York is a barrier for entry to students from mid- to lower-class backgrounds."
Physicist Chad Orzel turns the tables on Ed Yong's recent post about how scientists can do a better job of meeting the needs of journalists: "In reality, the responsibility is mutual. Scientists need to make an effort to make the journalists’ jobs easier, as much as they can," Orzel writes. "And journalists, too, need to make an effort to respect the interests and concerns of the scientists they talk to, avoiding hype and oversimplification."
Characters, obstacles, rewards — those are keys to even lousy stories, Tommy Tomlinson writes at Nieman Storyboard: "What the story’s about is literally what happens in the narrative — who this character is, what goal he or she is trying to reach, what obstacle is in the way. The unique set of facts. What the story’s REALLY about is a way of saying, what’s the point? What’s the universal meaning that someone should draw from this story? What’s the lesson?"
Who deserves protection under journalism shield laws? Once it was someone who worked for a media organization, or was published by one. Now that the Internet has made everyone a publisher, the lines are blurred, Jeffrey P. Hermes writes: "When considering whether to grant legal protection for the gathering and dissemination of information, the question should not be the person performing those acts, i.e., 'who is a journalist?,' but 'is this an act of journalism?'"