As bad as it's been for the newspaper business overall, it's worse for science sections, Christopher Zara reports in the International Business Times: "In 1989, the number of newspapers with weekly science sections was 95. Today, that number is down to 19, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. That’s a big drop, even for one of the fastest declining industries in the country." NASW President Ron Winslow and CASW President Cristine Russell are among the quoted.
Science writing news
Have you heard the 80/20 rule? Stephannie Beman puts it this way: "It’s basically 80% of your time should be on Marketing and 20% writing and other business related work." But she says the rule has it exactly backwards. You should spend 80% of your time writing and only 20% on everything else. Otherwise, you may not have anything much to market. Beman and others then offer some tips for keeping the beast — blogging, emailing, etc. — from taking over your workday.
So it wasn't the end of the world after all. Up next: Comet ISON. We'll see. The many medical developments of 2012. Contraception and Obamacare. Cardiology news. Teleportation and quantum computing on the way. Right after Comet ISON. Lead, the criminal element. So get the lead out. Blogging advice for the new year. Do we need a new policy on blogging comments?
Are you a student looking for guidance on how to establish a career in science writing? Are you curious about how senior science writers do their jobs? Here's your chance to find out through the NASW Mentoring Program, which matches science writing students with established science journalists and public information officers for a day during the AAAS Annual Meeting. This year's meeting is February 14-18 in Boston.
Blame writers who can't tell the difference between solid and shoddy medical research, let alone explain it to their readers, David H. Freedman writes in CJR: "Even while following what are considered the guidelines of good science reporting, they still manage to write articles that grossly mislead the public, often in ways that can lead to poor health decisions with catastrophic consequences." More from Colin Lecher in Popular Science.
It was the year when a Martian robot became a Twitter star, and when an Austrian daredevil made YouTube's top 10 list by plunging to earth at supersonic speed. Those were just two examples of how science fared in social media last year, Mary Ann Giordano reports in the New York Times: "To put it in 140 characters or less, social media and science found each other in 2012. In surprising numbers, people posted, viewed and searched for science-related topics last year."
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan tees off on a New York Times opinion piece praising "confessional writing." "There is nothing more painful to watch than a writer desperately grasping at ever less-important aspects of their own lives in order to make word counts, until they must simultaneously eat lunch and be writing about eating that lunch at the same time." More from Ann Friedman and Steve Buttry.
You might not think that the comments section of an online news story was all that important, but you'd be wrong, according to a study discussed in Science and covered by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Rude comments led readers to perceive more risk in the story's subject, researchers reported. Also, from Scholarly Kitchen, evidence that a handful of commenters dominate The Guardian's website.
Kevin Lomangino warns on HealthNewsReview.org about the dangers in reporting on studies that use composite outcomes to gain greater statistical power: "When these studies report a benefit, reporters should evaluate whether there was a similar effect on all components of the composite; if not, they should identify which component of the composite was primarily responsible for the result, and explain whether that component is more or less important than the others."