Chip Scanlan writes on Poynter.org about the importance of doing your homework before an interview: "A. J. Liebling, a legendary writer for The New Yorker, landed an interview with notoriously tight-lipped jockey Willie Shoemaker. He opened with a single question: Why do you ride with one stirrup higher than the other? Impressed by Liebling’s knowledge, Shoemaker opened up." Plus the dangers of "double-barreled questions" and why sometimes it's smart to just shut up.
Science writing news
A group of 40 Argentine writers, aligned through the nonprofit Argentine Science Journalism Network (RADCAP), have pooled their resources, time, and considerable talents to produce the first-ever anthology of “the best science articles” published in national and regional media during the past year.
Jodi Helmer says there are five ways freelancers undercut their own incomes, and she lists them in a WordCount post. One of them is focusing too much on a per-word rate: "In most cases, writing for magazines that pay top rates requires a lot more work, including extensive outlines to nab the assignment and multiple rewrites. Accepting an assignment with a lower rate, like 50 to 75 cents per word, not a few pennies per paragraph, often leads to a higher per-hour rate."
Bill O’Sullivan runs a magazine and teaches writing, and he offers surprising advice for writers on dealing with editors. He says this on simultaneous submissions: "I have no problem with them. Writing is your livelihood — why shouldn’t you shop a piece to more than one place at the same time? Just don’t send a query to a Washingtonian editor and say you’d like to write for the Washington Post Magazine. I’ve been on the receiving end of that blunder."
After a New York Times reporter gave a critical review to the Tesla S electric car, its maker fired back with an attack based on data collected by the car's instruments during its test drive. Did that settle things? Not at all, Kent Anderson writes on the Scholarly Kitchen: "Data can help tell a story, but the story can't necessarily be derived from the data alone. And big data don't replace the right data, as Nate Silver showed us during last year’s US elections."
Steven Brill goes through hospital bills and finds greed. Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end of the current US health care system? The New York Times abandons its Green Blog and the Washington Post makes changes in its environmental coverage too. There's general agreement that this bodes ill. German physicists, American physicists, and the atom bomb.
Dan Fagin explores the tragic impact of toxic industrial pollution on residents of a small New Jersey seaside town. A prize-winning environmental journalist, Fagin directs the New York University Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. "The reporting took longer than I ever imagined it could," Fagin writes, "requiring nearly 200 interviews plus extensive historical research and lots of Freedom of Information requests."
From the trenches of the modern freelancing markets, here's an odd email exchange between an editor at the Atlantic and journalist Nate Thayer. The editor inquired about publishing an adaptation of a piece Thayer had published elsewhere and added, "We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month." Thayer shot back that he was "perplexed how one can expect to try to retain quality professional services without compensating for them."
If your spreadsheet has a column labelled "name," you're probably doing it all wrong, Phillip Smith writes in an exhaustive post on the PBS Idea Lab: "How often have I stared in dismay, dumbfounded even, and grumbled to myself, 'You didn't really put all of that into one column, did you!?'" Smith explains what's wrong with that, and how it ought to be done, He also lists principles to keep in mind when building spreadsheets, and best practices for working with them.