When I was looking for my first journalism job, I did my best to scrape together a clip here and there. Every time I got a new one, I sent it with my resume to all the suburban papers around Boston, where I lived at the time. For the first couple of years, nobody replied.
Then I got a call from a fellow who...
When I was looking for my first journalism job, I did my best to scrape together a clip here and there. Every time I got a new one, I sent it with my resume to all the suburban papers around Boston, where I lived at the time. For the first couple of years, nobody replied.
Then I got a call from a fellow who identified himself as the city editor at the Lowell Sun. He invited me in for an interview. Why? "We had five copies of your resume in the file, and we decided we had to either hire you or get rid of you. We don't have any more room."
I did get hired, but not on the staff. I was given a halftime position with no benefits, at a rate of $100 per week. I was told that if I worked 40-50 hours a week in my "halftime" position, and if I did a spectacular job, they might--might--hire me as a regular staffer. It took me about a year to get hired.
It has always been tough to break in to journalism. And it's tough...
Bora Zivkovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia when it was still Yugoslavia, but he was born again into the world of science blogging. As one of the founders of the annual Science Online conference (or unconference, as they like to call it), an editor at Scientific American, a prolific...
Bora Zivkovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia when it was still Yugoslavia, but he was born again into the world of science blogging. As one of the founders of the annual Science Online conference (or unconference, as they like to call it), an editor at Scientific American, a prolific blogger himself, and the author of 111,418 tweets as of this morning, Zivkovic uses, understands and pushes the boundaries of the science blogging world as well as anyone.
So when he decides to assess the current state of blog commenting, it's worth paying attention.
In a substantial post at Scientific American, he begins with a word or two on the recent article in which researchers say they found that found that uncivil comments can...
National Geographic announced today that it will be launching a new science blog network, titled Phenomena, featuring four high-octane science bloggers - Virginia Hughes (Only Human), Brian Switek (Laelaps), Ed Yong (Not...
National Geographic announced today that it will be launching a new science blog network, titled Phenomena, featuring four high-octane science bloggers - Virginia Hughes (Only Human), Brian Switek (Laelaps), Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science) and Carl Zimmer (The Loom).
The new network, assembled by the magazine's executive editor for science, Jamie Shreeve, is scheduled to debut on Tuesday, December 18. It represents National Geographic's first serious move into the increasingly high-profile world of science blogging. (Although National Geographic acquired the old Scienceblogs network in 2011, it never showed any real enthusiasm for it).
But thanks to the quality of its debut bloggers, this new network, although small, represents a...
Last week, I posted on the future of Discover magazine's blogs and bloggers, and the reassuring news seemed to be that nothing would change. It was reassuring because Discover's blog network is widely thought to be...
Last week, I posted on the future of Discover magazine's blogs and bloggers, and the reassuring news seemed to be that nothing would change. It was reassuring because Discover's blog network is widely thought to be among the best science blog networks anywhere.
"They set the standard for other bloggers," said David Dobbs, who blogs at Wired. "Anyone would like to move there, I think. They are one of the best supported logistically and financially, and it shows in the product."
My post last week addressed the quality of Discover's blog network. But since I posted it, several people have raised a different question: Will the compensation paid to Discover's bloggers change?
Kalmbach Publishing Co., Discover's owner, ...
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
Why do so many bloggers begin with great enthusiasm only to abandon a few heartfelt posts to the sands of time?
Neuroskeptic, the neuroscience blogger,...
Why do so many bloggers begin with great enthusiasm only to abandon a few heartfelt posts to the sands of time?
Neuroskeptic, the neuroscience blogger, explains why those first weeks and months are so difficult:
The early days of any blog are psychologically tough because almost inevitably, your first posts are not going to get the recognition they deserve...That's because people tend to really pour their hearts into early posts - these are the ones that express thoughts you've been mulling over for ages and are finally writing about - and then inevitably, hardly anyone reads them...
The emergent blogger (I've been there more than once) is so happy to finally have a chance to say things from the heart, without a meddling...
All this time we've been looking in the wrong place! American women? Don't waste your time. It's been in Poland for decades, hiding inside the soft tissues of an 83-year-old Warsaw woman! Unfortunately, she's now deceased, and her G-spot has been carved up by a "cosmetic gynecologist."
No, you have...
All this time we've been looking in the wrong place! American women? Don't waste your time. It's been in Poland for decades, hiding inside the soft tissues of an 83-year-old Warsaw woman! Unfortunately, she's now deceased, and her G-spot has been carved up by a "cosmetic gynecologist."
No, you have not stumbled on to The Onion or The Daily Show. Here it is from Melissa Healy in the Los Angeles Times:
Like so many explorers before him, Dr. Adam Ostrzenski has long dreamed of finding a piece of elusive territory with a reputation for near-mythic powers. Ostrzenski's quarry is the G spot, the long-conjectured trigger for enhancing female orgasm. And in an article published Wednesday by the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the semi-retired Florida gynecologist declared that he had found it.
This is...
Last year, when I (@praeburn) came home from ScienceOnline2011 (#scio11), I told my wife, Elizabeth (@devitaraeburn) that it was the most exciting meeting I thought I'd ever attended. "The energy was incredible," I told her. "I got so many ideas. And I met all...
Last year, when I (@praeburn) came home from ScienceOnline2011 (#scio11), I told my wife, Elizabeth (@devitaraeburn) that it was the most exciting meeting I thought I'd ever attended. "The energy was incredible," I told her. "I got so many ideas. And I met all kinds of people whom I knew only from Twitter." I mentioned some and pointed her to their blogs. "You have to follow these people!" I said.
Many of them, I told her, were so excited about their writing that they were doing it for nothing other than the sheer joy of putting words to pixels. How they fed, clothed, and sheltered themselves was an obvious question, but few seemed to be starving, at least while the conference food was available; most were dressed, as far as I recall; and most seemed to have found a way to snag a room at the hotel. (I didn't see anything like an Occupy ScienceOnline tent city outside the hotel.) The 250 slots at last year's conference filled...
The blogger and science writer Ed Yong, who seems somehow to have new media in his DNA, continues to...
The blogger and science writer Ed Yong, who seems somehow to have new media in his DNA, continues to invent the future.
Yong had an epiphany early in the year, when he finished a science blog post he liked--a post someone had written for free--and thought to himself, "That's brilliant. I'd pay good money for that." It wasn't the first time he'd had that reaction. Then, in late February, he thought, “Hey, why don’t I pay good money for that?”
For nearly a year now, he's been doing exactly that:
...
...
The old media are still apparently gasping their last gasps, and gasping and gasping. As Brian Switek eloquently points out on Laelaps, it's past time for all of us to ignore assertions about who is a real science journalist, and to just get on with our writing.
Switek, nervously on the eve of quitting his day job, wandered into a session on maintaining "high journalism...
Last weekend in North Carolina, I saw the future of science writing.
Some 300 bright, enthusiastic and energetic science bloggers--scientists and journalists among them--gathered in Research Triangle Park for ScienceOnline 2011. The mood was vastly...
Last weekend in North Carolina, I saw the future of science writing.
Some 300 bright, enthusiastic and energetic science bloggers--scientists and journalists among them--gathered in Research Triangle Park for ScienceOnline 2011. The mood was vastly different from what you might encounter in a traditional newsroom. The black humor, cynicism and ironic detachment of newspaper newsrooms was replaced by an eagerness to learn and a willingness to share. These folks--and I count myself among them--love what they do. Unlike me, they don't crow about discovering the future of science writing--they are creating it.
The conference, run by Bora Zivkovic, the editor of...
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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