You've seen the news on Twitter and elsewhere at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships site, but I thought it would be nice to mention on the Tracker that MIT's first Journalism Project Fellowship has just been awarded to the journalist and blogger Maryn McKenna. (McKenna is a friend of mine, so if you're looking for an objective report, you've come to the wrong place. I was not, however, involved in the selection process.)
She will spend some time at MIT in Cambridge next year, to participate in seminars with the other Knight science journalism fellows, and otherwise will be free to roam in pursuit of her story. She was awarded the fellowship for a project on food science and food production that will lead to a book-length manuscript and a series of multimedia stories by May, 2014.
McKenna is the author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010),and Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (FP/S&S, 2004), which recounts a year she spent embedded with the CDC's rapid-reaction force. She is a columnist for Scientific American and she blogs for Wired.
The fellowship is the thing McKenna teased on Twitter when she said she was anticipating taking on something that was out of her comfort zone. I asked her in an email to elaborate on that. Here's what she said:
I'm a career writer — first of newspaper stories, now of books, articles and blog posts — but I'm weak on other storytelling techniques, and it was past time to learn them. Phil Hilts, the KSJ curator, wanted whoever took this new fellowship to do a project that was at least partly digital, and that dovetailed well with my goals to learn multimedia and use it to tell this story in different ways. So I'm going to be taking advantage of the trainings offered to the regular Knight fellows to produce both audio/video and audio-only packages that will compliment the book I am mapping out on all this.
It's a huge leap for me, well out of my comfort zone, but I'm really looking forward to it and grateful to KSJ for giving me the opportunity.
We wish her well.
-Paul Raeburn
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