NASW members can access selected video of workshop sessions from the ScienceWriters2014 conference. Members can read more for the link and access code. Anyone can view highlight videos produced by the dynamic duo of Did Someone Say Science on their YouTube channel.
ScienceWriters meeting coverage
Science writers may think they're above politics, but issues like climate change and Ebola prove them wrong. Four leading science writers discussed the problem at ScienceWriters2014 and David Levine recaps: "The basic message the panelists had for the writers was that when a story goes political, they had to get out of their comfort zone of writing "nice" articles about scientific research and breakthroughs and be part of the bigger picture."
Thanks to Did Someone Say Science, you can now relive ScienceWriters2014 or see what you missed in Columbus. Visit their YouTube page for videos, which include a highlights reel and interviews with panelists, presenters, and attendees. NASW travel fellows also crafted reports on individual workshops, student journalists covered New Horizons in Science sessions, and you can look back at #sciwri14 for tweets galore. Select sessions were videoed for release here or via CASW at a later date.
Of the four panelists, Apoorva Mandavilli, a freelance journalist formerly of Nature, managed to stay the truest to this panel’s title: “International reporting: how to NOT screw it up.” Though to be completely truthful, the whole panel might as well have been called “Foreign reporting: Wherein things are already screwed up … Good luck!”
If there was one take-home message from the workshop on “How to start writing about science for kids,” it might be that kids are people too. Sure, they are typically smaller people, but they have rich inner lives and are more sophisticated than we think, said panelist Jude Isabella. So don’t talk down to them. That said, if kids are your audience, you will not get away with long-winded, meandering “adult” prose. Remember those lessons from writing 101.
A 2010 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that exercising 60 minutes a day leads to less weight gain over time. The study, which involved more than 34,000 women, prompted widespread media coverage. Sure, p < 0.001. But the actual effect was less than a half pound difference over three years! That is what Kristin Sanaini, freelance science writer and professor at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, discovered when she dug into the paper.
For any good public information officer (PIO), the goal is pretty simple: tell people about the research going on at your institution. Typically, this means writing a press release and sending it to journalists. But PIOs are increasingly looking for alternative ways to connect with the public. NASW’s session “Beyond the News Release Grind,” moderated by Karen Kreeger, senior science communications manager for Penn Medicine, offered many creative and powerful ideas.
Despite small steps forward and an encouraging groundswell of concern about the issue, racism and sexism are alive and well in U.S. newsrooms, and diversity remains sorely lacking. This according to a panel of journalists who met Saturday at the NASW conference, for a lively, standing-room-only discussion on “Supporting Diversity in Science Writing.”
“In our profession, information is currency,” says freelance science journalist Nadia Drake, introducing a small crowd of participants to a media law workshop at the NASW annual meeting in Columbus, OH. “It's what we trade in, whether you're a freelancer, staff writer, PIO, or scientist, and there are laws governing how you can get some of that information.”
For early career science writers, scoring a byline in a national science magazine can be a daunting prospect. One solution: start small.