Traditional print publishing has always left a big gap, writes Byliner's John Tayman in the winter Nieman Reports issue: "A story that needed 10,000, 20,000 or even 30,000 words to be properly told inevitably fell into publishing's dead zone. This represented the vast wasteland of impossible-to-place stories that were longer than magazine space permitted and shorter than a book was thought to be." Tayman describes Byliner's effort to find markets for those stories.
Science writing news
Craig Silverman on Regret the Error offers two stories about danger lurking in a publication's archive and trapping an unwary reporter years later. In one case, a reporter writing a blog post reused material from a story he'd written 30 years earlier — only to find afterward that he'd misspelled a source's name. Silverman cites the resulting correction and offers three tips for reporters who want to stay out of trouble when mining their own clips or anybody else's.
The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is updating its Guide to Careers in Science Writing and is conducting an anonymous salary survey of science writers to ensure the guide contains up-to-date salary information. They would very much appreciate your taking a few moments to fill out and submit the brief survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7RJ9KNQ.
Don’t write a pitch longer than the story you’d be assigned. Don’t pitch stories from Science, Nature, PLoS, or PNAS. Don’t start your pitch with who you are or who we know in common. Those are just three tips from a panel of editors on The Open Notebook feature, "Pitching errors: How not to pitch." From the intro: "Writing a good pitch is really tough. Writing a bad one is easy. Editors see the same mistakes over and over again, even from good writers."
Easily the best reading of the holiday season was Amy Harmon's “Navigating Love and Autism,” a front-page New York Times story, with accompanying video, about two young people with Asperger syndrome who are trying to build a relationship. Seth Mnookin, who knows a thing or two about covering autism, interviews Harmon on his PLOS blog. And Jim Romenesko has the story behind “the best NYT correction ever”.
Among a half-dozen selections from Curtis Brainard's 2011 collection are the "hot ticket" of the ScienceOnline conference, and the logistical and political challenges of the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. Also, a possible turning point for climate coverage, and why journalists go wrong when "covering crazy" — "From killers to celebrities to dictators, this year has already born witness to more armchair psychiatry than critics can stomach."
We begin 2012 with bloggers' lists of 2011 highlights. Sex, retractions, weather, videos. Also, a timeline for the tale of faster-than-light neutrinos.
The Poynter Institute's Jim Colgan seems worried that we'll be offended by his suggestion that "journalists should at least experiment with online audio – whether they work in radio or not." If so, he makes amends by comparing and contrasting SoundCloud, AudioBoo, and Broadcastr: "While SoundCloud has an element of social media, AudioBoo is all about being the Twitter for audio." He also talks to public radio executives about the power of audio journalism.
If you're employed, what you write is generally your employer's property. But the lines are blurry in the era of social media, Rob Pegoraro reports on DiscoveryNews. A site called PhoneDog Media "is suing journalist Noah Kravitz for $340,000 — that's $2.50 per Twitter follower times 17,000 followers times eight months — for renaming the company-branded @Phonedog_Noah account he had set up to the more personal @NoahKravitz after his departure from the firm."