Most freelancers fear audits, but there are ways to lessen the trauma and expense of encounters with the Internal Revenue Service. Here are some reminders for NASW members on how to cope with audits.
ScienceWriters magazine
Have you ever had trouble getting access to information or sources you need for a story? To help address the problem, the recently reconstituted Information Access Committee has created a database in which NASW members can share experiences trying to gain hard-to-obtain information or speak to scientists to whom access is restricted by institutional media policies.
The Why Files: The Science Behind the News, one of the oldest popular science websites, ceased publication on Jan. 21, roughly the 20th anniversary of its birth as an experiment in the nascent technology once called the World Wide Web. The cause of death was a university-wide belt tightening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Here are some words and phrases you have probably been misusing: comprise, fulsome, foundering, begging the question. Here are some others: comorbidity, latent construct, hierarchical stepwise regression, principal components factor analysis. That second list comes from a review titled “Fifty Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid: a List of Inaccurate, Misleading, Misused, Ambiguous, and Logically Confused Words and Phrases”, which was published in Frontiers in Psychology by researchers from Emory University, Sacred Heart College, Georgia State University, and SUNY–Binghamton.
Over recent years, more and more research institutions seem to be adopting a corporate marketing approach to their communications. You can recognize these marketers by their use of such buzzwords as branding, messaging, market penetration, and cost-benefit analysis. It’s an approach that risks compromising research communications, and more broadly a research institution’s missions to create and disseminate knowledge. But corporate marketing is by definition shallow marketing. By aiming to sell the institution as a branded product, it fails to serve the intellectually rich marketplace of ideas in which researchers operate.
ScienceWriters, Winter 2015-16
Requiem for The Why Files; Jeff Hecht's guide to self-republishing; an update on the World Conference of Science Journalists 2017; what writers should know about IRS audits; plus the usual departments, book reviews, and news about NASW members. Full text visible to NASW members only.
The federal government has assembled a fast-track committee to encourage research into microorganisms, reflecting the recognition of their increasingly important role in human health and the Earth’s climate. Jo Handelsman, Ph.D., a Yale microbiologist and current associate director for science to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), described the initiative during her Patrusky Lecture at this year’s New Horizons in Science briefing.
The International Science Writers Association (ISWA), arguably the world’s oldest international organization of science journalists, has a new roster of officers as of Sept. 1. James Cornell has retired from the office of president and was succeeded by Pallava Bagla, author, columnist, Science correspondent, and science editor for New Delhi Television, India.
Most NASW members and other freelancers are “cash basis” taxpayers. That’s IRS jargon for, among others, writers who have to declare advances and royalties for books and payments for articles in the year that they actually receive them. Similarly, the IRS generally forbids freelancers from deducting business expenses and other allowable outlays until the year that they actually pay them.
Which programs help you write and edit most efficiently; let you import and mark up articles from publications, websites, and other sources; and let you share documents with a co-author? What is the learning curve? The NASW-Freelance discussion list recently explored these questions.