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.
ScienceWriters magazine
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.
Tax-savvy freelance writers and other self-employed individuals know that they have two choices on how to write off their outlays for purchases of equipment and other kinds of personal property. One is depreciation; the other is so-called first-year expensing. But countless tax-challenged writers mistakenly believe that depreciation is the only way to deduct equipment purchases. As a result, they pay far more in taxes each year than legally required.
PIOs and their colleagues might have noticed a push NIH recently made to reinforce the requirement that grantee institutions provide acknowledgement of federal funding in press releases, stories, and other publicly facing items. Some of you may also have heard from NIH lately about including grant numbers in press releases and similar materials, too. Here’s what these projects are all about.
From time to time, all of us will find ourselves wondering whether all of the blood, sweat, and tears that we put into our work are making a difference. There are a lot of academics in the field who are very interested in these questions, and in this issue we feature three articles that we hope will expand your thinking about the ways in which science writers make a difference in their professional, local, and global communities.
A perfectly legal way for freelance writers to trim taxes is to employ their children. Their salaries stay in the family, but are shifted into their lower tax bracket. The jobs also put some “jingle in their jeans,” familiarize them with freelancing, and instill a bit of the old work ethic.
Paul Raeburn: Two years ago, I felt lucky to announce that I had been lured to the Sunshine State by Florida Atlantic University, which offered me a free hand to develop a new master’s program in science writing. Sadly, all has come tumbling down.
Joel Shurkin: Forty-three years ago this summer I covered one of the most important stories in human history: The first human landings on another world. Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong. The moon. It was a different journalism world then, and a different America. The media were concentrated, rich, powerful. America was self-assured, rich, daring. Children, you missed a wonderful time.
For seven exhilarating minutes this past August, the newsroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory crackled with the human electricity of telepresence. In those moments, hundreds of reporters, jammed elbow-to-elbow, were joined by a global audience drawn directly into the heartbeat of a breaking-news event.
Sid Caesar once said that comedy has to be based on truth. By that measure, the humorous cover design of the 2011 annual report for Research Communications at Ohio State was based on the truth that the four people then on staff — Earle Holland, Jeff Grabmeier, Emily Caldwell, and Pam Frost Gorder — are, fundamentally, extreme personalities. From the Summer 2012 ScienceWriters.