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Science writers have always had to cope with angry readers or industries who don’t like their stories. Responding to criticism is part of the job. But these days journalists, PIOs, and scientists find themselves facing personal attacks and even death threats. Just writing about global warming, GMOs, or vaccines can trigger personal attacks or lawsuits. Women are also subjected to harassment, stalking, threats of rape, and barrages of pornography.
During the ScienceWriters2014 meeting, Amber Dance and Dennis Meredith were awarded the annual Diane McGurgan Service award, which recognizes outstanding volunteer contributions to the National Association of Science Writers. The award is named after NASW's former executive director Diane McGurgan. Amber and Dennis co-chair the Science in Society Journalism Awards program. Read more to learn about their contributions to NASW.
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.
Cheap and easy blogging tools have given campus news offices the ability to self-publish some of the research news that has been increasingly difficult to place in the mainstream media. But when the media relations team at Stanford University School of Medicine started talking about launching a blog in 2008, they decided to go one step further and publish news not only of their campus, but general health and medicine news, including developments at other schools.
The winners of travel fellowships to ScienceWriters2014 were asked to file reports on many of the conference sessions, and we've begun posting them on our conference reports page. More reports will be posted as they become available, so keep returning to that page over the next few days. And don't forget to mark your calendars now for ScienceWriters2015, October 9-13 in Cambridge, Mass.
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.