Volume 51, Number 4, Fall, 2002

NASW WORKSHOPS IN DENVER FEB. 1213, 2003

Mark your calendars and register online now for NASW 2003 Denver.
The NASW Workshop Committee, board, tour leaders, panel organizers, and staff have put together a schedule of events with plenty of opportunity for professional development, networking, and fun. This years workshops feature a weather and climate science theme.
Workshops will be held at the Colorado Convention Center, the same site as the AAAS meeting that follows. Online registration and more details are available at nasw.org/meetings.

REGISTRATION FEES

Field trip: $40

Thursday workshop: $110 if registered by December 1; $125 thereafter.

Student rate $60.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12

Field trip

Field trip to National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder. (Attendance limited. Register early.)

  • View the C-130 Hercules aircrafts air sampling and instrumentation capabilities.
  • See a climate-monitoring and diagnostic laboratory, where scientists study atmospheric gases and smaller particles and how they influence the Earths climate, the thickness of the ozone layer, and the quality of the air we breathe.
  • Visit the Space Environment Center, the nations official source of space-weather alerts and warnings.
  • Visit a powerful visualization lab and experience demonstrations of climate, aerosol, solar models, and representations of real data in 3-D.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13

Workshops, Colorado Convention Center, Denver

Panel sessions feature a weather and climate theme to take advantage of the world-class climate resources in Colorado. Panelists include scientists, reporters, authors, and public information officers from the nations top research institutions and media.

PLENARY SESSION

Are we missing the real climate change story?

Organized by: J. Madeleine Nash, Time magazine; Krishna Ramanujan NASA; Ashley Simons, SEAWEB

Hard-to-predict impacts, political influences and scientific complexity make climate change a tricky topic to cover. How can we be sure we are handling it well? Do we, as panelist Andy Dobson wryly observes, sometimes get things half right for the wrong reasons? This session focuses on questions we ought to be asking of our sources, our editors, and ourselves.

Panelists:

Tom Lovejoy, director of the Heinz Center in Washington D.C.; former chief biodiversity advisor to the World Bank; co-editor of the forthcoming book, Climate Change and Biodiversity.

Linda Mearns, senior scientist, Environmental and Societal Impacts Group, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colo.

Andy Dobson, epidemiologist and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

Kris Wilson, professor of journalism, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

This plenary session of the NASW 2003 Workshops takes place the morning of Thurs., Feb. 13, 2003, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

Other weather and climate panel sessions

  • Break out of the global-warming trap: an update from the front lines of science, policy and the media
  • Weather and climate models: their strengths and limitations
  • Extreme weather stories: storm clouds and silver linings

Panel sessions on science writing for freelancers, staffers, and PIOs with both pro and rookie tracks

  • Embargoed for release: does it help or hurt?
  • Infoshop collaboration secrets: increase your coverage power
  • Selling or telling: the intersection of marketing, public relations and science writing
  • When marketing masquerades as news
  • Plagiarism: when it happens to you
  • Writing book proposals that sell
  • Beyond Google: new strategies for Web research
  • Storytelling 101: Pulitzer tale weaving
  • Helping scientists talk to the media

The Thursday workshops also feature the ever-popular networking lunch, with dozens of topic tables for discussions and networking with your colleagues.

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