Articles

On science blogs: Take care

Steven Brill goes through hospital bills and finds greed. Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end of the current US health care system? The New York Times abandons its Green Blog and the Washington Post makes changes in its environmental coverage too. There's general agreement that this bodes ill. German physicists, American physicists, and the atom bomb.

Detective story: Fagin's Toms River

Dan Fagin explores the tragic impact of toxic industrial pollution on residents of a small New Jersey seaside town. A prize-winning environmental journalist, Fagin directs the New York University Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. "The reporting took longer than I ever imagined it could," Fagin writes, "requiring nearly 200 interviews plus extensive historical research and lots of Freedom of Information requests."

From ScienceWriters: NASW's grant and fellowship database

You have a great idea for a book, a longform narrative article or an investigative piece, but the payment the publisher offers won’t cover the cost of the project. Skimpy funding doesn’t have to mean the end of the project, though. There are grants, fellowships, and other resources available to help you turn great ideas into reality. A new database from NASW can get you started.

A pen that's more than just a pen

Helen Fields sure likes her Livescribe pen and she writes about it for the Science Writers' Handbook. It costs $120 to $200, and to use it, you have to write on special pads that cost $25 per pair. But for that, you get a pen that automatically synchronizes your handwritten notes to your audio recordings: "I find the pen particularly useful for checking quotes," Fields writes. You can pre-order the NASW-funded Handbook from the NASW Bookstore.

On science blogs: The human brain, journalism, Darwin's finches

The moral of the Jonah Lehrer story: Science writing is impossible because of the human brain. Nevertheless, lobbying for the Brain Activity Map. The Darwin finch genome project. Obamacare news: the Republicans are bringing us socialized medicine.

From ScienceWriters: A computational astronomy boot camp

The idea was a natural. Modeled loosely on the short, single-topic boot camps of the Knight Science Journalism program or the National Center for Atmospheric Research, ours would be the first on astronomy to be offered on the West Coast, and the first anywhere on computational astronomy.

Meet the 2013 NASW undergraduate travel fellows at AAAS

Ten talented juniors and seniors from across the country gathered in Boston Feb. 14-18 to report on the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting as NASW's undergraduate travel fellows for 2013. During the next several days, we will be posting their reports here.

On science blogs: The Return of Jonah Lehrer

As you probably know, Jonah Lehrer again. Lehrer gave a Fat Tuesday talk explaining away his plagiarism and other sins against science journalism. The reviews were terrible. The Knight Foundation paid him $20,000 for the talk. The reviews were terrible for that, too.

Order the Science Writers’ Handbook

It isn't being published until April, but you can order this NASW-funded guide now at a discount from Amazon.com by using this NASW bookstore link. In the Science Writers’ Handbook, 35 science writers "share their hard-won wisdom and illuminating stories, going beyond the basics to cover everything else you need to survive and thrive as a science writer." Also, direct orders for 10% off the cover price will be available soon to NASW members.

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