Deborah Blum

President’s Letter

by Deborah Blum

When I started as a science writer at the Sacramento Bee--which was unbelievably almost 20 years ago--I was the paper’s first full-time science writer. They weren’t sure what to do with me. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. So, my first assignment neatly got me out of the way. It was a massive project on chronic disease that didn’t come to fruition for nine months. For most of the year, I floated--a reporter without a byline--like a disembodied spirit haunting the newsroom. The series, by the way, was practically an encyclopedia; years later, another reporter confided that he thought I’d covered every cause of death except boredom.

Over the years, through stories on wildfires, viral epidemics, NASA launch failures and successes, primate research, and nuclear weapons design problems--that sense of disconnection evaporated. Almost. To the end, my editors couldn’t help finding the science beat, well, just a little different. My last year at the paper, in 1997, we had a staff meeting to talk about increasing our coverage of local communities. The editor held up the paper. There was my story on Mars. He just shook his head. Clearly, science writers were still, well, aliens.

As an organization, too, the National Association of Science Writers tends to see itself as different. Separate from other writers groups. Journalistic aliens. And in some ways that may never go away. There remains that gap-both perceptual and actual-between people who cover astrobiology (us) and those who cover city council meetings (them). But more and more, science news is front-page news, feature section news, sports news, and yes, political news. We’re not just tucked onto a “science page” so often. And more and more, NASW is beginning to see itself as connected to the larger world of communication.

At least, so I hope. We need to pay attention to the unique demands of being good science communicators. But I think it also serves us to be part of the bigger community of communicators, to share what we know with other writers’ organizations and to learn from them. Our previous president, Paul Raeburn, started going to meetings of the National Council of Journalism Organizations, and we’ve continued doing that this year.

That connection not only helps us learn what other groups are doing or concerned about, but it allows us to do more meaningful things ourselves. For instance, it was through the council that NASW officers became convinced that we should join other groups in asking the Federal Communications Commission to slow down its plan to allow greater media monopolies in urban markets. We sent both e-mails and letters to FCC chairman Michael Powell suggesting that any move to diminish the number of independent media voices needed far greater study.

Obviously--and, in my opinion, wrong-headedly--the FCC dismissed our concerns and others. And yet I believe that was an issue worth arguing for. And if efforts to countermand it continue, we will do our best to support those, too. We are organizing on other policy fronts, as well, in a more unified sense. This spring, board member Glennda Chui began forming a freedom-of-information task force. The committee hopes to coordinate with other journalistic groups, such as the Society for Environmental Journalists, which are already working on problems in accessing government information. We think this is an issue that will need a united journalistic voice, especially as our federal government continues to close off access to public records.

We’re also exploring the position of other writers’ groups who are trying to fight the increasing corporate use of all-rights contracts for writers. The National Writers Union, for instance, has indicated that it may organize a group protest this fall as part of a continuing series of actions. NASW freelance board members have been working to develop an analysis of how science writers are affected by those contracts. We want to take on this issue in a prepared and focused way.

We’re also working to expand our science-writer training programs beyond our membership. As I mentioned in an earlier letter, for the first time this year we are developing a program at the annual meeting of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW). The conference is scheduled in late October in Knoxville, Tennessee. We’re still in the preliminary stages but think we have an exceptionally smart format for this afternoon-long program, which will focus on risk communication and crisis communication.

We have also been talking with representatives from the World Federation of Science Journalists, a new organization, about helping with their first conference, in Montreal, in the fall of 2004. And we are exploring the possibility of sponsoring a panel at the annual meeting of the health care reporters association (next spring in Minneapolis).

That’s a long way to come in a short time, and I hope we’ll continue to go an even greater distance. I think that using the skills we’ve developed-in thinking about issues that matter to science writers, in learning how to share them-makes a terrific way to connect us with other groups.

I hope we’ll continue to build these associations both internationally and with other writers’ groups in our country. Just to beat our own drum for the moment, what we do as science writers is too important to be marginalized and I think we should provide a strong and connected voice in newsrooms-and elsewhere.

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Deborah Blum is a freelance writer and professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin. She can be reached at dblum@wisc.edu.