Robert Krulwich is brilliant. I am sure he gets told that all the time. If you don’t know who he is, he’s an ingenious and witty explainer of scientific principles, is a limpidly talented story teller, and is currently in the employ of NPR. There he is a lynchpin of the Radio Lab program. His blog, Krulwich Wonders, is one small platform for his knack of employing easy words for hard concepts. Ive never worked with him or even met him that I recall, but his love for and loyalty to journalism, including science journalism, is without bound.
Ed Yong, freelancer and freebie-par-excellence via that Not Exactly Rocket Science blog he writes for no pay (aside from ad money of course), and also perhaps the record-holder of science tweetie meisters, features Krulwich in a recent, very long post. It is long because Yong includes the entire 5000 word plus commencement address that Krulwich delivered to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism a short time ago.
It’s a fine talk. Inspiring and utterly engaging. Much of it has to do with Krulwich’s youthful worship of the icons of radio, starting with Murrow and moving on to Kuralt. The theme is that the old days of paternalistic media barons and reliable healthy paychecks are about gone, the new days in journalism are tough but they also are fecund with excitement and possibility. It gets around – well after its midpoint – to science writing and the vital and somewhat distinctive communal, collegial atmosphere it has and that is rather unusual in journalism. It turns out that this passage was inspired largely by Yong and his cohort-mates in science journalism at this year’s Science Online meeting in N. Carolina, many of them scratching their ways to make a living in a slippery trade. Ergo, Yong is a paradigm. A digm here and a digm there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
I encourage anybody who wants to know more about the essential spirit of journalism and its future, including the science beat, to read it.
*UPDATE: By the way, for Krulwich fans, here’s a recent blog piece of his on lyrebirds, a dance-obsessed Australian species that, with its talent for mimicry in song, sometimes sings a tribute to the agents of its own destruction. It’s imitation of a chainsaw is a stunner.
– Charlie Petit
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