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.
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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.
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.