Bird flu in Southeast Asia, the 2011 tsunami in Japan, infections transferred in hospitals and AIDS in the rural south. Facts are only part of these stories. When told from the perspective of the people impacted by the facts, science stories come alive and may even catalyze change.
Event coverage
Coverage begins in 2006 for the ScienceWriters meeting and 2009 for the AAAS meeting. To see programs for past ScienceWriters meetings, go to the ScienceWriters meeting site.
After the briefest of encounters with legalese, I feel two things: happiness about having never become a lawyer, and gratitude towards anyone who will explain it to me in straightforward terms.
If there was one take-home message from the workshop on Covering Controversies, it might be that science journalists have the obligation to investigate whether something is a legitimate controversy — and if it’s not, the obligation to avoid covering it at all.
What makes a good editor and how do you become one? In a packed room at the annual NASW conference, four science editors discussed that question, as well as an editor’s duties, the relationship between editors and writers, and the ethical challenges editors regularly face.
After Melinda Wenner Moyer’s son was diagnosed with sensory processing disorder, she wrote an article called “My Son Has a Disorder that May Not Exist” for Scientific American Mind. She struggled, though, with whether to include her actual son and their family’s actual story. While their experiences were the motivation for exploring this topic, she worried that he could later be discriminated against because of the article (or mocked by his peers when they learned how to Google). In the end, she and her editors decided to use his real identity in the print version but an alias in the immortal online text.
From starting your own podcast to self-publishing an e-book, sometimes a science writer just feels the need to go it alone. Although it can be a challenge to make such ventures turn a profit, they can be worthwhile, said panelists during a session titled "DIY publishing — Does it yield?" held during the Science Writers 2015 Conference in Cambridge, Mass.
NASW members can access selected video of workshop sessions from the ScienceWriters2014 conference. Members can read more for the link and access code. Anyone can view highlight videos produced by the dynamic duo of Did Someone Say Science on their YouTube channel.
Thanks to Did Someone Say Science, you can now relive ScienceWriters2014 or see what you missed in Columbus. Visit their YouTube page for videos, which include a highlights reel and interviews with panelists, presenters, and attendees. NASW travel fellows also crafted reports on individual workshops, student journalists covered New Horizons in Science sessions, and you can look back at #sciwri14 for tweets galore. Select sessions were videoed for release here or via CASW at a later date.
Of the four panelists, Apoorva Mandavilli, a freelance journalist formerly of Nature, managed to stay the truest to this panel’s title: “International reporting: how to NOT screw it up.” Though to be completely truthful, the whole panel might as well have been called “Foreign reporting: Wherein things are already screwed up … Good luck!”