If there is a more successful trade school anywhere that lures bright people away from their budding professional scientific careers and into something that pays less and offers less prestige than being a professor of something too complicated for most people to grasp, I would be surprised. I speak of course of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Science Communication Program.
As we in the biz know, one can make a very nice living from science journalism and related careers. But the primary rewards are not piles of money or wide public fame. But science writing for general audiences delivers ever-changing intellectual challenges (without the exacting drudgery of most days doing scientific research). It is usually lots of fun and, especially if doing short-deadline stories, yields frequent satisfaction with oneself for having completed a socially important and often entertaining task. Plus, as news writing goes with its tendency toward bad news and bad people, science journalists tend to interview smart people who did something right. That’s a tonic.
About 300 people have gone through the nine-month certificate curriculum since 1981. The great majority, I’ve heard, find success afterward. Banana slugs (after the school mascot and staple, slimy resident of the campus redwood groves) roam in undulating herds in major conference newsrooms and workshops where science reporters and suchlike gather. Hardly a masthead of any US science-centric publication lacks a slug or two.
Too much backstory, so on to the news: Director Rob Irion sends word that this year’s lot has published its annual Science Notes, a collection of magazine-style feature stories. Reflecting how news flows these days, the publication has infographics, data-rich plots, videos and podcasts. Instructive and explanatory imagery is provided primarily by students at the Science Illustration Program at nearby Cal State University Monterey Bay.
I’ve read them all. Many stimulating moments. While the expiring ksjtracker has fancied itself a site for journalism criticism, this is no time to pick on somebody just starting out. All these stories have their moments and several are more than good enough to run in first-rank publications. It, for a science writer, is just the thing to download and use as absorbing reading on a plane or vacation. Expectation is lock solid that we will be seeing more under these bylines.
You can go straight to the site above. There you will find short autobiographies of the writers as well as the CSU-Monterey Bay artists. But in part to get all the new slugs’ names in, here are the individual links to the stories:
- Becky Bach (art by Fiona Lee MacLean, Leah Hammon) – Not a Drop to Drink/As drought threatens the Santa Cruz water supply, division paralyzes the city ;
- Patricia Waldon (art – Quinn Burrell, Lindsay Wright) – Baby’s First Migraine/ Pains of a different kind in childhood can point to a lifetime of headache
- Molly Sharlach (art – Jen Gillies, Adam Labuen) – Biting into the Bizarre/ Moray eels show there’s more than one way to snag a snack in the ocean
- Nsikan Akpan (art – E.J. Jackson) Feisty ants and Coffee Plants/Organic coffee is touted as an ecological boon, but there’s a darker reality –
- Jyoti Madhusoodanan (art Elana Ryznar) Inner Selfie/ Tune in to an elusive internal sense, and you just might feel better
- Matt Davenport (art Rachel Morris, Thao Do) – Japan’s Slippery Fault/ The secret of the devastating 2011 tsunami smoldered beneath the seafloor ; I must remark on a simile I haven’t seen before, on how tectonic forces cause earthquakes: “As if the moving plates were cranking a colossal jack-in-the-box, the tension eventually becomes too great and pop goes the fault.”
- Julia Calderone (art Jessie Jordan) – Health by Hookworm/ Would you infect yourself with parasites to treat a stubborn ailment?
- Cynthia McKelvey (art Terra Dawson) – Bugs in the Barrel/ Beer’s oldest tradition finds a new home in the San Francisco Bay Area
- Nicholas St. Fleur (art Mary Williams) – Fireball Physics/ The best documented meteor was a blast for scientists to reconstruct
- Cat Ferguson (art Melissa Snider, Becca Berezuk) – Death at the Races/ Hundreds of horses die at the track every year. Can anything change? ;
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