Travis Saunders at Science of Blogging surveyed his readers about the blog sites they visit most often, and he posted the results last week: "Scientopia and Scientific American appear to be the big winners, with Scienceblogs, Wired, Discover and PLoS BLoGs packed slightly behind, and the other networks getting a few votes each." One respondent: “I go to SciAm for the science, Scientopia for the culture, and SciBlogs for a sense of nostalgia.”
Science writing news
Paul Lieberman beat the odds when his Los Angeles Times series about a mob-fighting police unit became a motion picture, "The Gangster Squad," to be released this fall. He tells how it happened in this article from the Winter Nieman Reports. "The desire to have the best — or most salable — story must never undermine our responsibility to challenge even our most compelling material," he writes. "A commercial film, on the other hand, thrives on embellishment."
Saving your favorite tweets, creating a photo gallery, posting photos to Twitter from 16 external sites — those and other tips are discussed by Paul Boutin on the New York Times Personal Tech blog: "Twitter has been augmented, by the company and by other Internet toolmakers, with a virtual appliance store of simple, utilitarian features, widgets and services that let users find interesting posts, create photo albums or search Twitter more efficiently."
All about ScienceOnline2012 (#SciO12). The meeting, the people, the blogging, the videos, the commentary, the tweets, the Storifies.
For starters, don't pitch a new year story two weeks into January, writes Denise Graveline on her Don't Get Caught blog. She lists examples both good (a pitch to Andy Revkin at the New York Times) and bad ("Want to make sure I got your email? I got it. Want to see if I need to speak with someone? If I need to, I’ll ask.") Plus how to pitch infographics and how to avoid becoming a spammer when sending out press releases.
Michael Eisen discusses a move in Congress to overturn a National Institutes of Health policy ensuring free access to results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research. "The policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce," Eisen writes. More comment from Michelle Clement on the Scientific American blog network.
A recently retired South Carolina reporter reappears in his old paper, writing a health column sponsored by a local hospital. "Red flags go up when we see a column written by a grateful former patient who is now being paid by the health care provider to whom he is grateful," writes Gary Schwitzer on healthnewsreview.org. "I’m not in Schwitzer’s camp on this one," Trudy Lieberman replies on the Columbia Journalism Review site.
Dan Kennedy's memoir about raising a daughter with dwarfism got good reviews but went out-of-print in 2008, having sold a mere 1,600 copies. Two years later, after a teacher friend asked for more copies than were available, Kennedy published his own at a Harvard Square bookstore. He writes about the experience in the winter Nieman Reports. "I can't tell you exactly how much I made, but I'd say it was somewhere between $750 and $800," Kennedy writes.
OJR's Robert Niles has a good rant about "crap data." "Whenever I'm stuck searching for information via Google or Bing, I inevitably have to scroll past link after link to scraped websites — pages written not by any human being, but slapped together by scripts created to blend snippets from other webpages into something that will fool Google's or Bing's algorithm into promoting them." His solution? A return to Yahoo-style web indexes, collated by human editors.