Starlee Kine from This American Life discusses what makes a story, and how one can get away, on Nieman Storyboard: "I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re like fighting over who sleeps where and, like, showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside."
Science writing news
You know how every new movie seems to spin off a dozen related products? Writers can do the same, Joanna Penn writes on The Book Designer. Penn offers some pointers on creating video, audio, and other multimedia products: "You can use video interviews with experts in your niche for blog content but also for your products," she writes. "You can use Skype for free video calling and then Ecamm for the Mac and Pamela for the PC in order to record in the split screen mode."
Hurricane Sandy and the science of weather. There's no way to know if human-caused global warming made Sandy worse--but humans are definitely responsible for the degree of devastation . Links to many Sandy photos. Sandy killed thousands of lab mice and rats but gave life to birders. Sandy, Presidential politics, and suddenly climate change is an election issue at last. The politics of health care and the Nate Silver backlash. Yes, it's yet more on Jonah Lehrer.
Brad Frazer takes questions about the often-esoteric details of U.S. copyright law. For example, does registering a work published in an electronic format also cover later print versions? Yes, Frazer writes: "Except for sound recordings and derivative works like a screenplay (in which the words are changed), one registration of your copyright in the book as a PDF (or whatever the required Deposit Copy file format is) will cover multiple print formats of that same book."
What do you do if you can't get back to New York from ScienceWriters2012 because of Frankenstorm? If you're on the staff of Scientific American, you set up shop in Raleigh and broadcast The Science of Hurricane Sandy Liveblog from your temporary quarters: "We’re trapped in Raleigh, North Carolina, thanks to Sandy. We have founded Scientific American‘s first-ever Raleigh bureau and will be live-blogging on the storm and answering your storm science questions."
Reports are coming in quickly from the ScienceWriters2012 conference in Raleigh, N.C.. You can read the first reports on our conference reports page. They include "Do PIOs need science journalists any more?" and "Writing science ebooks in the real world." More reports will be posted in coming days, along with photos from conference events. Also, it's time to start thinking about ScienceWriters2013.
From a new CJR book, a chapter excerpt based on a 2002 lecture by New Yorker fact-checking director Peter Canby, with stories like this one about the author of A Bright Shining Lie: "One more thing I want to say about Neil Sheehan is that it was a particularly frustrating experience for us fact-checkers because Neil Sheehan never got anything wrong, and at the end of two months we would go, 'Neil, give us a break, you know? Give us one little thing we can change.'"
For seven exhilarating minutes this past August, the newsroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory crackled with the human electricity of telepresence. In those moments, hundreds of reporters, jammed elbow-to-elbow, were joined by a global audience drawn directly into the heartbeat of a breaking-news event.
A two-stop tour of UNC-Chapel Hill’s nanotechnology research and a visit to see non-invasive, no-harm research protocols at the Duke Lemur Center are among today's highlights at "a meeting for science writers, by science writers." If you are unable to attend, you can follow the Twitter hashtag #sciwri12 and watch this space in coming days for further reports. The conference runs through Tuesday and we'll post reports as they are received.