NASW news

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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