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.
Science writing news
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.
If a computer can win at Jeopardy, can it answer questions in the newsroom? That's a question posed by Jonathan Stray on a Mediashift Idea Lab post. Stray also includes a top-ten list of best data mining ideas for 2011, including Graphical Inference for Infovis, which can help journalists answer the question, "How do we know when a data visualization shows us something that is 'actually there,' as opposed to an artifact of the numbers?
Whether or not the Internet has enabled plagiarists, the subject remains murky. Salon convened a panel to debate where the lines are. From spy novelist Jeremy Duns: "I think if you were to make a film about a man trying to find another man, that’s not an idea that belongs to anyone. If you set it in the jungle, you might be unconsciously inspired by Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness.' That's fine too." But make one man a rogue colonel in wartime and you've got trouble.
Craig Silverman takes a break from collecting errors and provides links to his favorite copyediting tipsheets on the Poynter web site: "If a story refers to a direction, check it. That may mean getting out a map and looking at the direction." He also discusses what happens when copyeditors get carried away: "Editors save writers from making mistakes ... but it’s also true that the editing process can introduce errors. This drives both writers and editors crazy."
"I had dreamed of being a novelist since I was a kid, and now am the astonished author of 15 books and counting," former Seattle Times reporter William Dietrich writes in the winter Nieman Reports. The transition hasn't been seamless. There was one year when Dietrich says he had no income. But the biggest challenge was learning the business: "Your mission is to become a brand, figure out how to market it, and then reapply for your job every year or two."
It's Google's world and we just live in it. But in what can only be an effort to stay on our good side, the ubernerds offer free instruction in an array of computer tools that can be useful for journalists in moving from print to online publishing. The 10,000 Words site has this introduction to Google Code University: "In Web Programming, for example, there are lectures, videos, and contributed course content to teach users how to create interactive web applications."
Alleluia! Next week is the blogger's Holy Week: ScienceOnline 2012. Here's how you can be there even if you're not there. Also links to the program, the people, and everything else #SciO12. Including a session on how to create an eBook, organized by Carl Zimmer and me.
Writing on Nieman Storyboard, Julia Barton says one of the NPR science program's biggest innovations is the way it shifts broadcasting from an oratorial style to something more conversational: “Producers are finding they can sound more like themselves. 'Radiolab' co-hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich break down complicated stories through a relaxed Socratic dialogue, an approach that’s also been popularized by NPR’s 'Planet Money' and APM’s 'Freakonomics.'”