Dennis Meredith writes that Explaining Research and Working with Public Information Officers are making him more money through workshops and speaking engagements than from sales. Meredith, who created the Marketing and publishing resource on the ScienceWriters web site, offers advice on promotion and self-publishing in the Spring 2011 issue of ScienceWriters magazine, free to NASW members.
Science writing news
The death of Osama bin Laden: genomics, neuroscience, health and medicine, anthropology, media matters.
What's Tumblr? It's the latest social media must-have, according to this post from Jojo Malig at the Poynter Institute. More than 160 news media organizations are using the image-heavy blogging platform. So are individual journalists. But what is it good for, and how do you get started using it? This “Tumblr for journalists” slideshow from Matthew Keys has plenty of quick tips.
The Royal Wedding, Kate and William, William and Kate, and the genetics of inbreeding. Also wed: National Geographic and Scienceblogs.com. Or maybe they're just living together. Temporarily. Autism and childhood vaccines remain wedded in the minds of some. Sigh.
Gary Taubes takes on another dietary foe: Sugar, he declares, is not just empty calories, it causes most of what ails us, even (maybe) cancer. The BP Gulf oil spill a year later: Still an oily residue. New guidelines on early diagnosis for Alzheimer's disease: What's the point, since there's no therapy?
The Allen Human Brain Atlas at last, accentuating the similarities between Homo saps. Language may be Out of Africa too. The US science budget survives, mostly. But wait 'til next year, when it will be the liberal brain vs. the conservative brain.
Registration is now open for the 2011 World Conference of Science Writers in Doha, Qatar, June 26-30. The event includes multimedia workshops, dozens of sessions on hot topics in science writing, and field trips to explore science and the environment in the Arab world. NASW is content partner for the WCSJ, in collaboration with the Arab Science Journalists Association and the World Federation of Science Journalists. Early bird registration ends April 11.
As Japan suffers through a big aftershock, there are more questions about radiation and other kinds of environmental damage, and online media experiment with telling Japan's story digitally. Another kind of aftershock follows this week's big paper on hormone therapy for symptoms of menopause. It showed that HT appears to reduce the risk of heart disease and even breast cancer in some women. That should have been good news, but it mostly added to the confusion.
Seven recipients of the 2011 Laura Van Dam Fellowships for travel to the World Conference of Science Journalists in June have been selected.
The controversial Google book settlement has come undone. Although there is talk of trying to revise it or appeal the court ruling against it, it's essentially back to square one for efforts to create a broadly accessible digital public library. An update from NASW's Jeff Hecht of his December 2008 guide to the now-rejected pact.
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