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.
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.
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!”
If there was one take-home message from the workshop on “How to start writing about science for kids,” it might be that kids are people too. Sure, they are typically smaller people, but they have rich inner lives and are more sophisticated than we think, said panelist Jude Isabella. So don’t talk down to them. That said, if kids are your audience, you will not get away with long-winded, meandering “adult” prose. Remember those lessons from writing 101.
A 2010 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that exercising 60 minutes a day leads to less weight gain over time. The study, which involved more than 34,000 women, prompted widespread media coverage. Sure, p < 0.001. But the actual effect was less than a half pound difference over three years! That is what Kristin Sanaini, freelance science writer and professor at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, discovered when she dug into the paper.
For any good public information officer (PIO), the goal is pretty simple: tell people about the research going on at your institution. Typically, this means writing a press release and sending it to journalists. But PIOs are increasingly looking for alternative ways to connect with the public. NASW’s session “Beyond the News Release Grind,” moderated by Karen Kreeger, senior science communications manager for Penn Medicine, offered many creative and powerful ideas.
Despite small steps forward and an encouraging groundswell of concern about the issue, racism and sexism are alive and well in U.S. newsrooms, and diversity remains sorely lacking. This according to a panel of journalists who met Saturday at the NASW conference, for a lively, standing-room-only discussion on “Supporting Diversity in Science Writing.”
“In our profession, information is currency,” says freelance science journalist Nadia Drake, introducing a small crowd of participants to a media law workshop at the NASW annual meeting in Columbus, OH. “It's what we trade in, whether you're a freelancer, staff writer, PIO, or scientist, and there are laws governing how you can get some of that information.”