Pamela Colloff's long but compelling Texas Monthly story about a boy's death and a mother's trial mixes science with questions of guilt and innocence, Nieman Storyboard reports: "We find out that the boy, Andrew, would have had to eat 23 teaspoons of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning or 6 teaspoons of table salt to hit the lethal level." Plus an interview with Colloff about her specialty reporting on problematic convictions.
Science writing news
Joe Konrath pulls no punches in his post about the inevitability of Amazon: "If you don't like apex predators, get the hell out of the food chain. Here's the thing, all you whiners. You had your shot. And you blew it." Amazon's dominance, he says, will benefit both authors and readers while harming bookstores, agents, and distributors. The Scholarly Kitchen site discusses Konrath's post along with other essays on the changing book business.
How many neurons in the human brain, and where did the traditional number — 100 billion — come from? Ötzi-the-Iceman's genome revealed. Trying to write science for women's magazines and other mass media. New rules for statins. Heartsick about the Heartland climate change email scandal. Open sesame for Open Access. For now.
When the science writer said the British Chiropractic Association "happily promotes bogus treatments," the group had to react, its newsletter says (PDF). "For years, chiropractic had been castigated in a succession of critical articles, but here was a published article which had explicitly named a chiropractic association and had made defamatory comments about it," its president writes. Singh's co-author Edzard Ernst responds in the Guardian.
An MIT panel recently batted that question around, and Andrew Phelps has a summary on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. The answer may be yes, Phelps writes, but with caveats — including who does the labelling and who reads them: "Descriptive labels, rather than prescriptive labels, connote truth. But who is to determine the ingredients of a news story? And if we know how much of our news intake is opinion, celebrity gossip, and fluff, will that change our behavior?"
"I’m never sure if it’s OK to 'just say no' to an editor’s edits," a questioner begins on The Open Notebook, partly funded by an NASW Idea Grant. Four writers and editors respond with a "maybe." An editor: "I hope that the writer will appreciate that I’ve spent many hours working out how best to edit a story, and that edits are made for a reason: to make something clearer, more logical, more suitable for our audience, or to fit on on page."
Looking for ways to cover science on a tight travel budget? For the fifth year in a row, the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings invites NASW members who are working journalists or freelancers attending on assignment from a media outlet to apply for travel funding to attend the Lindau Meeting. Deadline: April 4.
Doctored quotes, altered facts, invented characters — those are just some of the sins Hillary Rosner recounts in her tell-all blog post, Their So-Called Journalism, or What I Saw at the Women’s Mags: "My experiences working for women’s mags have been incredibly frustrating and disheartening — and I’ve long wanted to share them publicly but haven’t, for fear of alienating potential clients." She finally relented and found support in her post's comments.
The famous Susan Orlean story goes under the microscope in this Nieman Storyboard post by Andrea Pitzer. Orchid thief John Laroche may be the central character, Pitzer writes, but it's Orlean's reactions to him that propel the story. "Orlean is not holding Laroche up as a figure of sympathy or someone to pity, because Laroche has done something most of us never will, at least on a grand scale: He has surrendered his life to obsession."