Thanks to The Last Word on Nothing blog that fab science writer Erika Check Hayden, among others, writes for (hello to you too, Tom) a lot of us in the biz are finding out about Matter, a science and journalism project that Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson are managing. It raises money to provide regular, feature-length science stories. Last week they started a fund raising drive, to raise $50,000 with the aim of paying writers who would provide for them one story per week. It blew past that goal. The latest figure at the site is $140,000+.
A video is at the site just linked, too. It has some pretty snide, accurate things to say about the state of science journalism. Such as “Some Treat Press Releases As If They Were News … But It doesn’t Have to Be this Way.”
Well, um … press releases ARE leads to some pretty good news that otherwise would go unreported, says one who has spent a lot of time chasing down the things are that were behind a lot of press releases. I’m not talking about mere rewriting the releases, which is a pretty weak grade of beer, but defending them as one avenue toward honest work. PIOs do provide a service. But the larger truth is correct: the best stories are not the ones that press agents are telling you about every day. They require more writing than can be read in three minutes, too.
Matter is not the only non-profit-type outfit supporting long-form journalism without many PIO’ fingerprints in them (Climate Central, Yale e360, High Country News, ProPublica, Miller-McCune, …. lots more). More is better.
Thanks to Jim Handman for the tip.
– Charlie Petit
Leave a Reply