First, skip the Powerpoint, Jeremy Caplan writes in this Poynter post. Instead, produce a short video for prospective funders. (Caplan gives good and bad examples.) Second, for face-to-face conversations, hone your message to the basics — a brief value proposition, a brief founding story — and save the details for later: "Whether you’re pitching a new journalism project to a friend or to a financier, you often have to pack your message into a few fleeting moments."
Science writing news
They are saying obesity is the scourge of the nation. It must be true because it's on television. Body Mass Index and weight-loss drugs. What docs should do about Fat City — and Fat Country. Evidence for the low-carb paleo diet. Evidence against the low-calorie low-fat diet. The Scienceblogging Weekly. Teleportation sets a record: 97 km. Was pornography the first cave art?
When was the last time you checked a newspaper to see what's playing at a movie theater, or to find out how your favorite sports team did? If you're like most Americans, it's probably been a while, Stijn Debrouwere writes. Instead you go to a web site that specializes in that subject: "Much of what they facilitate or do doesn’t look like journalism at all," Debrouwere says. "But you’d be naive if you thought their services aren’t often consumed instead of news."
The two influenza researchers whose work has triggered a far-reaching debate on the limits of scientific freedom could hardly have handled their publicity more differently. From the Spring 2012 ScienceWriters.
Digital journalism specialists from the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others contributed to the Data Journalism Handbook, a project of the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Chapters include "The Web as a Data Source," "Start With the Data, Finish With a Story," "How to Build a News App," "Using Visualizations to Tell Stories," and "Different Charts Tell Different Tales."
Cutting off Wikileaks' access to credit card processors. Enlisting the government to help police copyright. Giving their own content more favorable access to their networks. These are just some of the ways technology companies are impeding free speech, Dan Gillmor writes in Columbia Journalism Review. Gillmor also discusses how journalists need to upgrade their technological skills and equipment to protect their sources from government prosecutors or worse.
The 2011 Nobel Prize winners in physics invited dozens of unsung colleagues to Stockholm, and Science staff writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee tells The Open Notebook how he wrote their story: "I was just lucky to be talking to scientists who were themselves pretty good storytellers — and because the event was such a once-in-a-lifetime event for them, their memory of it was very strong. As it was pretty recent, it was fresh on their minds."
One year after its launch, the long-form site's founder Evan Ratliff sits for a Q&A with Nieman Storyboard. So how much does he pay his writers? "We’ll pay the writer a fee – a typical fee is probably $5,000 – plus 50 percent of the royalties. The royalties come after the platform takes its percentage," Ratliff says. "Which means that if the story doesn’t do well, the authors end up getting paid maybe what they’d have gotten paid to write for Harper’s.
Science and politics and homosexuality. Should science writers boycott North Carolina? Current science says that same-sex marriage is good for public health and adds data to the old conjecture that rabid gay-bashing cloaks same-sex attraction. The gay caveman is exhumed. The Open Notebook presents quotes on quoting. Did dinosaur farts cause Mesozoic global warming? We don't know, but they certainly cause hot air in the media.