Amid hand-wringing about the New York Times disbanding its environment desk and dropping its Green Blog, Thomas Hayden has hopeful thoughts about the environmental news cycle: "First, the record suggests that the beat will be back stronger than ever just as soon as something newly horrifying happens. Second — and this is new — you’ll still be able to get all the environmental reporting you want in the meantime, no matter what the mainstream journalism outlets do."
Science writing news
Plenty, says Joe Donatelli. By treating every story equally, and every writer equally, pay-per-word degrades both the best writers and the best stories: "I calculate how many hours the story will take and multiply that number times my hourly fee. This is what other professionals do. They give an estimate and a rate. As far as I know, freelance writers are the only professionals who charge for their services so arbitrarily. It’s like paying a carpenter by the nail."
The inverted pyramid may be obsolete as a newswriting model, but its influence lingers in what Mike Feinsilber call "last-things-first" writing — sentences that run in reverse chronological order. Feinsilber explains: "Even inside the story, where the urgency to blurt out the news has been satisfied, we find last-things-first sentences. That makes no sense. It forces the reader to read the sentence and then reconstruct it in his mind to make it make sense."
No less an authority than Poynter's Roy Peter Clark thinks the plagiarism police need to rope it in. In a post that his bosses disowned via an editor's note, Clark writes: "Too scrupulous an ethic on plagiarism will lead, I fear, to witch hunts. Plagiarism — along with its cousin fabrication — should be policed. The punishments for wrongdoers should be harsh. But the word plagiarism should be confined to clear-cut cases of literary and journalistic fraud."
If you attend the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ2013), in Helsinki in June, be prepared, even if not to hug some trees, at least to go into the woods for some scientific — and social — interactions with your lumber-loving hosts. Indeed, a sure conference highlight will be “science at midnight,” a seminar on the development of innovative and renewable wood-based materials for the future, held in the heart of a coniferous boreal forest.
Lindsay Goldwert crossed the line from reporting to public relations. In this PRNewser post, she looks back at her reporting days from a new perspective, and she doesn't like a lot of what she sees: "Now that I’m on the other side of things, I am receiving my comeuppance in a big way. For the first time, my professional emails go unanswered – total radio silence. I feel like a nuisance. In short, I’ve come to know the pain of being treated the way I treated others."
Getting full text of academic journals can be difficult unless you work for a major university or a large corporation that has an account. The National Association of Science Writers has made arrangements for its members with several outlets, including Elsevier and Annual Reviews. This page has a summary of those and other journal resources, and how to apply for access to them. Thanks to the publishers and to NASW member David Levine for the compilation.
Indemnity clauses, all-rights contracts — these are things to examine in a contract, Hillary Rosner writes for the Science Writers' Handbook. To ask for changes: "Explain as clearly and diplomatically as possible what you want to change and why. But don’t apologize. This is a business transaction, and your job is to get the best possible terms for yourself as a professional." You can pre-order the NASW-funded Handbook from the NASW Bookstore.
Behind the many books of Tracy Kidder lies an editor named Richard Todd. Now they've written a book, Good Prose, which Carl Sessions Stepp reviews in AJR: "Like many fine editors, Todd seems to have trouble pinpointing what he does that is special. What stands out, instead, is a more holistic picture of editing, where shimmery concepts like trust and respect matter as much as technique and wordsmithing." Buy the book from the NASW Bookstore.