As the panelists convened for the session on social media, it was only fitting that two NASW graduate fellows were already seated in the second row twittering away. But the question on the minds of many in the room was: Are these new tools a revolutionary way to communicate, or are they just a distraction?
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.
Physics can help NASCAR fans understand why their favorite racecar driver lost. Carbon-dating can help history buffs unearth forgeries. According to panelists at ScienceWriters 2008 held Oct. 24-28 in Palo Alto, Calif., it takes only a fresh eye to find applications of science in activities such as these and other everyday happenings.
Choosing terms; it's something science writers do every day, sometimes with careful thought, sometimes in the last minutes before deadline. This panel at the 2007 NASW annual meeting challenged writers to use care when choosing terms and constructing analogies to describe contentious science, noting that if writers don't think through their choices, they may well be letting interest groups do it for them.
Back by popular demand, the pitch slam drew a full room of freelancers eager to pitch their ideas to a prominent panel of editors from New Scientist, Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times and High Country News. Each publication relies on freelancers to fill front-of-the-book news stories, features, and other departments.
At the 2007 NASW Science and Society meeting in Spokane, Wash., an audience of about 30 science writers benefited from the inside knowledge of two speakers about the process of negotiating a book contract with a traditional publishing house.
The NASW Annual meeting in Spokane was honored to have members of the Arab Science Journalists Association as guests, and they presented a fascinating view of writing about science in another culture.
Science was borne from observation and continues to rely on new ways of seeing phenomena. If it's such an innately visual practice, why has science been so difficult to illustrate?
The lead in: balance in freelance?