A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve...
A writer working with John Belushi's widow on a biography of Belushi says he can demonstrate that reporting by the legendary Bob Woodward of The Washington Post might get the facts right, but it distorts their meaning.
"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions," Tanner Colby writes in Slate. Colby says his work on the new Belushi biography put him in the position of essentially re-reporting Woodward's 1984 book ...
Standing beside a large screen displaying brutal comments on Twitter, the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer today delivered a talk that seemed to be aimed primarily at rehabilitating his writing career, rather than offering any insights on his journalistic misdeeds.
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Standing beside a large screen displaying brutal comments on Twitter, the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer today delivered a talk that seemed to be aimed primarily at rehabilitating his writing career, rather than offering any insights on his journalistic misdeeds.
Lehrer was paid $20,000 for his talk by the Knight Foundation, according to Andrew Sherry, the foundation's spokesman. Lehrer spoke at a Knight Foundation journalism conference in Miami. (The Knight Fellowships at MIT were established by a grant from the Knight Foundation.)
In his first public remarks since resigning from The New Yorker last summer, Lehrer began by apologizing to his readers and his colleagues. "My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about...I am profoundly sorry," he said. "It is my hope that someday my...
New Scientist, the respected British science news magazine, is running a contest offering the winning writer a tour of the Arctic sponsored and led by a Norwegian oil company.
"New Scientist has teamed up with the global energy company Statoil to provide one lucky winner...
New Scientist, the respected British science news magazine, is running a contest offering the winning writer a tour of the Arctic sponsored and led by a Norwegian oil company.
"New Scientist has teamed up with the global energy company Statoil to provide one lucky winner and a guest the trip of a lifetime. They will cruise around Spitsbergen, one of the closest islands to the North Pole, fly to the giant Troll platform and descend 300 metres below the waves to the sea floor," says the contest announcement.
The description of the prize sounds like something from a TV game show. "You and your friend will fly to Svalbard and spend one night in the capital Longyearbyen and two nights aboard a luxury cruise ship. A Statoil guide will be your host as you sail across the pristine waters of the Billefjorden, go...
The day that news of the Newtown school shooting broke, The New York Times and other news organizations got some key facts wrong. Not least was misidentifying the gunman as Ryan Lanza, when it was actually his brother, Adam Lanza. According to Margaret Sullivan, the...
The day that news of the Newtown school shooting broke, The New York Times and other news organizations got some key facts wrong. Not least was misidentifying the gunman as Ryan Lanza, when it was actually his brother, Adam Lanza. According to Margaret Sullivan, the public editor at the Times, the paper's lead story the next day
got several major facts wrong, stating without attribution that Mr. Lanza was 'buzzed in' to the Sandy Hook Elementary School building by its principal, who 'recognized him as the son of a colleague.' Not so. He forced his way into the school, dressed in combat gear and carrying guns. There is still no confirmation that his mother, Nancy Lanza, ever worked at the school.
She begins her column--"Getting It First or Getting It Right?"--by...
My post last week on what I thought were dubious European science-writing prizes has generated some interesting comments regarding press junkets. Apparently this is a more widespread problem than I had suspected.
A...
My post last week on what I thought were dubious European science-writing prizes has generated some interesting comments regarding press junkets. Apparently this is a more widespread problem than I had suspected.
A junket, in the way journalists think of it, is a reporting trip paid for by the people or organization being covered. The problem with this is immediately apparent. If a reporter travels to a research project using his own resources, he or she is free to write whatever story develops, whether it's complimentary or critical. But a reporter who is a guest of the research project, being housed and fed by the hosts, could find it difficult to write a critical story. It would be a little like staying at a friend's beach house and complaining about the food or the mattress; we're uncomfortable about it, so we usually don't do it.
The two European prizes I...
Just a few weeks after I happily was named a science writer at the AP, a pharmaceutical company called to tell me that it was planning a conference that I should cover. "Tell me more," I said. "It's in Geneva," the pharma publicist said, "and we'll pay your way there and back, put...
Just a few weeks after I happily was named a science writer at the AP, a pharmaceutical company called to tell me that it was planning a conference that I should cover. "Tell me more," I said. "It's in Geneva," the pharma publicist said, "and we'll pay your way there and back, put you up in a hotel, and feed you. And all you have to do is go to the conference." Or words to that effect.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, you know what I mean? I could have taken the junket, quit the AP, and launched myself into a glamorous world of travel and writing to promote the products of the pharmaceutical industry. Instead, I opted for long hours and a subsistence income. (The income has grown a bit over the years, but the hours don't seem to be any shorter.)
Pharma's offer was what's known, technically, as a junket. It wanted to pay me to write favorable stuff.
That's what seems to be happening with a couple of...
The issue of whether or not sources should be allowed to approve quotes before publication has arisen once again, this time in the White House.
Michael Lewis, the respected author of the best-selling "Moneyball" and other books, wrote a story on President Obama for Vanity...
The issue of whether or not sources should be allowed to approve quotes before publication has arisen once again, this time in the White House.
Michael Lewis, the respected author of the best-selling "Moneyball" and other books, wrote a story on President Obama for Vanity Fair, and he conceded this week that he had agreed to allow the White House to review and approve or nix quotes before they went into the story.
In a story by Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times, Lewis, who wasn't quoted directly, seemed to justify the practice by saying that the White House objected to very little of what he wrote. That's nice to know, I suppose, but it sidesteps the issue of whether Lewis should have agreed to the review or not. Peters seems to suggest...
[7:15 pm EDT: Updates with comment from Matt Crenson, managing editor at Science News.]
Several Science News reporters complained publicly on Facebook Thursday about what they say are repeated examples of misappropriation of their stories by UPI.
Here...
[7:15 pm EDT: Updates with comment from Matt Crenson, managing editor at Science News.]
Several Science News reporters complained publicly on Facebook Thursday about what they say are repeated examples of misappropriation of their stories by UPI.
Here's one example. On July 23rd, 2012, Nadia Drake of Science News wrote the following, in a story entitled "Crowd Sourcing Comes to Astronomy":
After performing a Yahoo! image search for photos of Comet Holmes, which whizzed by Earth in 2007, a team of astronomers used the returned images to reconstruct the comet’s orbit in three dimensions — proving that astronomers can take advantage of data provided by an unwitting group of participants.
“I think it’s the beginning...
I'm not eager to review the latest disclosures of offenses by the neuroscience writer and fabulist Jonah Lehrer, because, frankly, I'm too repelled by it. But if you're looking for a recap (and it's grim, I assure you), you can find it...
I'm not eager to review the latest disclosures of offenses by the neuroscience writer and fabulist Jonah Lehrer, because, frankly, I'm too repelled by it. But if you're looking for a recap (and it's grim, I assure you), you can find it on last Friday's edition of Tammy Powledge's excellent blog, On Science Blogs This Week.
She also reviews the latest on the climate conversion of former skeptic Richard Muller, complete with charts, tables, and graphs.
Powledge's blog--you can find the link every Friday on the home page of the National Association of Science Writers--should be essential reading. I always find something I would have been sorry to miss.
- Paul Raeburn
We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
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We have long berated science writers for doing cursory rewrites of press releases when they should have done more careful reporting on their own. Now The Tennessean of Nashville has neatly sidestepped that problem by running the releases themselves, avoiding the irresponsible reporting.
Clicking on the Health and Fitness link on the paper's website today, I found Children will be more active if their friends are, written by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Songs from the heart, again by Vanderbilt; and...
The New York Observer reports that a story by veteran Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley on cholesterol-lowering drugs was spiked because the magazine was running an ad for Lipitor.
"The piece had been edited, approved, fit to layout, and moved to the final stages of production before being abruptly spiked on the night of Dec. 9," writes the Observer's Nick Summers, who worked at Newsweek until last October.
Summers wrote about the situation last week. Begley's story--...
Correction 12/3/10: Knight Kiplinger of the Kiplinger Foundation wrote to make...
Correction 12/3/10: Knight Kiplinger of the Kiplinger Foundation wrote to make clear that the foundation is rooted in journalism (the Kiplinger business publications), making it a journalism organization. I've corrected the text below.
I think it was Charles Darwin who said, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
Which brings to mind the National Press Foundation. Yesterday, I criticized the foundation for taking funding from Pfizer for its "all-expenses-paid" annual cancer conference for reporters.
This morning, I looked at the press foundation's donors. In its...
...
If you cover cancer, you might be eager to attend what looks like a great conference: Cancer Issues 2010, the National Press Foundation's "fourth, all-expenses-paid, educational program on cancer issues."
From the NPF announcement:
Confirmed speakers include: Dr. Minetta Liu of the Lombardi Comprehensive...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts at ScienceBlogs and at Forbes, you might be interested to know that this is not a new phenomenon. Long before "blog" entered our lexicon, E.B. White, the eminent prose stylist--who, to my knowledge, was not especially known as a defender of journalistic mores--railed against a similar situation in Esquire magazine--in 1976!
David Cay Johnston reminds us of the episode,...
In her...
In her column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Unnatural Science," Virginia Heffernan cites three examples from science blogs and comes to the following conclusion:
Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.
Do you hear that, science bloggers? That's you she's talking about.
Under the guise of reporting on...
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