The indispensable Diane McGurgan, the boundless heart and sweet soul of NASW, will be stepping down effective January 1 as executive director, after a generation of tireless service to science writers.
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The Great Turtle Race embraced everything web. It was interactive, participatory, solution-oriented, immediately accessible, updated several times a day, visual (videos, photos, charts, maps), and animated. It seeded and linked social networking, and had lots of context and continuity. It was useful and entertaining.
By Robin Mejia
Choosing terms; it's something science writers do every day, sometimes with careful thought, sometimes in the last minutes before deadline. This panel at the 2007 NASW annual meeting challenged writers to use care when choosing terms and constructing analogies to describe contentious science, noting that if writers don't think through their choices, they may well be letting interest groups do it for them.
By Hannah Hoag
Back by popular demand, the pitch slam drew a full room of freelancers eager to pitch their ideas to a prominent panel of editors from New Scientist, Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times and High Country News. Each publication relies on freelancers to fill front-of-the-book news stories, features, and other departments.
By Jane Neff Rollins
At the 2007 NASW Science and Society meeting in Spokane, Wash., an audience of about 30 science writers benefited from the inside knowledge of two speakers about the process of negotiating a book contract with a traditional publishing house.
By Kevin Begos
The NASW Annual meeting in Spokane was honored to have members of the Arab Science Journalists Association as guests, and they presented a fascinating view of writing about science in another culture.
By Amy Maxmen
Science was borne from observation and continues to rely on new ways of seeing phenomena. If it's such an innately visual practice, why has science been so difficult to illustrate?
By Michele Zacks
The lead in: balance in freelance?
By Kevin Begos
We've all been there: struggling to find a narrative, lede or metaphor to make a complicated science story understandable to the general public. Writers Michael D. Lemonick and Michael Shermer tried to explain their methods at a NASW 2007 Session, but in some cases left the audience wishing for more details.