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| Volume 51, Number 3, Summer 2002 |
LETTERSRegarding Lee Siegel's "pain in the rear" (On the Lists, SW, Spring 2002) Personal honors are just part of the problem I'd categorize as "news that media can't use." During my tenure as a science and medical at Northwestern (1966-71) and the University of Chicago (1971-81), I not only had to deal with honors, but appointments, gifts, big donors, research grants, visiting dignitaries, building dedications, and other "must" stories. For example, we had a big donor at the University of Chicago, Maurice Goldblatt, who headed the Goldblatt Brothers department store chain. He was one reason for cancer research at Chicago. The other Goldblatt brother had died of cancer, and Goldblatt spent years raising money for cancer research at Chicago. He became one of Mary Lasker's leading allies in beating the drums for cancer research. Along with his own multi-million-dollar donations, he got about $20 million more from other people for the University of Chicago. The University got Mayor Richard Daley to name our donor's birthday Maurice Goldblatt Day. I sent out an announcement and brought a photographer to record the event for the medical school magazine. The mayor's outer office was overflowing with TV crews and pencil press, but King Richard refused to come out, because they all wanted to ask him about a police raid on a Black Panther pad in which a lot of bullets had flown. Goldblatt had a private chat with the mayor, but I never got a picture. Your job is not to write puff pieces, but to help media writers compete against all the other writers to fill the news hole. Obviously your proposed stories must grab the editors, as stand-ins for the reader. You can always send the puff stories to the professor's college alumni magazine or neighborhood newspaper, if you want to bother. Jim Sweet (retired) # ScienceWriters welcomes letters to the editor. A letter must include
a daytime phone number and e-mail address. Letters may be edited.
Letters submitted may be used in print or in digital form by NASW.
Send to Editor, ScienceWriters, P. O. Box 1725, Solana Beach, Calif.
92075, fax 858-793-1144, or e-mail lfriedmann@nasw.org. |