[Updates Wednesday morning with Poynter comment regarding its partnerships with the European Journalism Centre.]
[Updates with more European junkets being promoted by the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations.]
"As one of the most prestigious competitions...
[Updates Wednesday morning with Poynter comment regarding its partnerships with the European Journalism Centre.]
[Updates with more European junkets being promoted by the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations.]
"As one of the most prestigious competitions of its kind, the European Inventor Award each year pays tribute to the creativity of inventors, whose quest for new ideas drives technological progress and economic growth, shapes our society and improves our daily lives," says an announcement directed at British science writers.
That's a story that might be worth covering. The award ceremony will be held in Amsterdam next week, not a terribly long or expensive trip for British journalists.
But they needn't worry about the price of the trip or their lodging.
The European Patent Office and the European Journalism Centre say they "...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not in Tuesday's Science Times. Instead, it appears on Thursdays, when it is less likely to be seen, I would wager. Last week's debut column concerned the 17-year cicadas, now appearing on fence posts and in trees in the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina. Today's is on some of the genes that were crucial in the transformation from wolves to dogs. The column leads the science page on the...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at capitalnewyork.com. Brainard directs and writes for CJR's The Observatory, which describes itself as "a lens on the science press."
AOL's Chris Grosso announced last Thursday in a blog post that Cyndi Stivers, CJR's editor, would become editor-in-chief of AOL.com. Joe Pompeo of...
“What if news organizations confronted the reality that nearly all media will be ‘social media’ a decade hence?…What if news organizations acknowledged this — or even got out in front of it, ahead of the curve this time — and organized themselves as platforms for...
“What if news organizations confronted the reality that nearly all media will be ‘social media’ a decade hence?…What if news organizations acknowledged this — or even got out in front of it, ahead of the curve this time — and organized themselves as platforms for talent?”
So begins a post at the Nieman Journalism Lab in which John Wihbeyin of the Harvard Kennedy School talks to Nicco Mele about his new book, "The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath." Mele, a lecturer at the Kennedy School and the Internet operations director for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential...
Ed Yong, one of the more followed and respected of science bloggers, stopped by the Knight Science Journalism program via Skype the other day and chatted with the Fellows. I think the talk was illuminating enough to post on our site....
Ed Yong, one of the more followed and respected of science bloggers, stopped by the Knight Science Journalism program via Skype the other day and chatted with the Fellows. I think the talk was illuminating enough to post on our site. Take a look.
Phil Hilts
At the National Association of Science Writers' annual meeting in Pittsburgh in 2005, Kendall Powell, a young freelance writer, was "soaking her conference-sore feet with three other writers in a huge jet-tub in the hotel's honeymoon suite" while they did one of the things...
At the National Association of Science Writers' annual meeting in Pittsburgh in 2005, Kendall Powell, a young freelance writer, was "soaking her conference-sore feet with three other writers in a huge jet-tub in the hotel's honeymoon suite" while they did one of the things writers do best: complain.
"I complained that while I met so many interesting colleagues at conferences, and always loved talking shop with them, it was difficult to keep up that camaraderie once we headed home," she writes. Online groups, she thought, were too impersonal. But would a small, more intimate group "serve as a virtual jet-tub"?
Out of that reverie came the birth of an online group known as SciLance, which has grown to 35 members, and out of SciLance came a very good guide to science writing--The Science Writers' Handbook, published this week.
The book, written by the members of SciLance,...
A classy new science magazine called Nautilus makes its debut this week, with the first of what will be monthly single-topic issues released serially in "chapters" each Thursday.
According to its press release...
A classy new science magazine called Nautilus makes its debut this week, with the first of what will be monthly single-topic issues released serially in "chapters" each Thursday.
According to its press release on PR Newswire, Nautilus "weaves leading-edge science, culture and philosophy into a single story told by the world's leading thinkers and writers." It will include "reported features, narrative non-fiction, essays, blog posts and interviews--as well as fiction, graphic stories, and interactive widgets and games," the release says.
"Nautilus connects science to our lives, one mind-expanding topic at a time," the release says. "Join us." It is being launched with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which funds a variety of projects on science and religion.
So far,...
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, ...
Johns Hopkins has closed its graduate science-writing program, alerting alumni in an e-mail that there will be no class next year. The program's director, Ann Finkbeiner, has resigned from the university.
The program has long been recognized as one of the top science-writing graduate programs in the country, along with others at NYU, Boston University, UC Santa Cruz, Columbia, and MIT. Finkbeiner told me in an email that she began teaching there about 1988 and became the program's director around 2000, although she was never a full-time Hopkins employee.
Finkbeiner told Michael Price...
Tom Shales was a widely admired columnist for The Washington Post where, he says, he "spent roughly 39 varyingly rewarding years, most of those as TV critic."
"Varyingly" is the key word. Shales, in a post on the About Editing...
Tom Shales was a widely admired columnist for The Washington Post where, he says, he "spent roughly 39 varyingly rewarding years, most of those as TV critic."
"Varyingly" is the key word. Shales, in a post on the About Editing and Writing blog by Jack Limpert, former editor of The Washingtonian, explains that much of the "variation" in his rewards came from editors he had, a few of whom were great, and most of whom were awful. There is no room for mediocrity in Shales's universe.
If you're an editor, you might be inclined to stop reading when you get to this, in the third graf:
I regularly denounced editors as a species, insulting them with such disparagements as, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t even teach, edit.” Editors, I liked to say...
Scientific American has taken over YouTube's Space Lab channel, relaunching it today as Scientific American Space Lab.
Scientific American and its editor, Mariette DiChristina...
Scientific American has taken over YouTube's Space Lab channel, relaunching it today as Scientific American Space Lab.
Scientific American and its editor, Mariette DiChristina, partnered with Space Lab in 2012, when Space Lab asked SciAm to contribute to the channel. (DiChristina had been a judge for Space Lab video competition and had appeared on the channel.)
SciAm launched a bi-weekly show called The Countdown--a round-up of the top five space stories in the news, with host Sophie Bushwick. Rachel Scheer, a SciAm spokesperson, said that "as the show flourished, the YouTube Space Lab team handed over the reins of the channel to Scientific American."
The new SciAm-branded channel features two other shows--Ask the Experts, and It happened in Space,...
The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY ...
The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY reports that Drummond most recently covered military research at Wired and has also worked at The Daily and AOL News.
Drummond introduces the section (sorry: the vertical) with a video here, which you might want to check out before heading over to The Verge Science. There you will find stories on...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology journalism platform that publishes one long story a month.
I wrote a couple of critical posts on Matter last November (here and here), mostly about problems I had downloading stories to my Kindle. One of Matter's founders, Bobbie Johnson, asked that I try the site again, because there were still "a lot of wrinkles to iron out."
Start-up issues aside, I confess that I don't get Matter. I'm always happy to see a new...
[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding...
[Updates with link to Scientific American stories.]
As I write, it's less than 24 hours since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the oldest marathon in the country and one of the nation's greatest amateur sporting events. Many reporters and others are reminding us that early reports in the aftermath of violence are often wrong. That was the case following the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings. Even such prestigious news outlets as The New York Times made mistakes in the first hours.
And the same thing seems to have happened here. Initial reports said investigators had found two unexploded bombs after the blasts. But that was later retracted, and...
Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and a holiday at MIT. We will be back tomorrow with something to say about statistical power in neuroscience, among other things. Please tune in.
-Paul Raeburn
Today is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and a holiday at MIT. We will be back tomorrow with something to say about statistical power in neuroscience, among other things. Please tune in.
-Paul Raeburn
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's Mirror Awards for reporting on the media industry have announced their winners and finalists. (The Mirror Awards announced finalists only; the winners will be announced at a June 5 ceremony in New York.)
Several science, environment and technology stories are among the winners and finalists.
The Seattle Times was a finalist for an IRE award with a story on "the dark side of elephant captivity," and National Geographic made the finals with a piece called "Blood Ivory," about the ivory...
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