Until a year or two ago, different kinds of journalists specialized in different ways of telling a story. Print, radio, television-the traditional categories are clearly defined in the annual AAAS Science Journalism Awards sponsored by the Whitaker Foundation.
But the Internet has provided a new media for journalists. Web-based publishing and related digital journalism ventures are growing so fast that hundreds of new writing and editing jobs are opening up for computer-savvy storytellers. New freelance markets beckon. And new journalists are emerging with the fullest range of storytelling tools so far: audio, video, graphics, words and more.
The media business has changed enormously in the past 40 years, but no change has come about as fast as what people are calling "new media," or online services, especially on the World Wide Web, note Steve Ross and Don Middleberg in Cyberstudy III (http://www.mediasource.com).
"Television became generally profitable in the 1950s, and 600 stations expanded into thousands," Ross and Middleberg point out. "FM vastly expanded radio outlets in the 1960s, but did not become profitable until the 1970s. Offset printing, along with more advanced list brokerage, made small-circulation magazines cost-effective in the late 1960s; the number of magazines exploded from a few thousand [to a situation where] that many new titles are created every three years or so now. Some 300 dailies disappeared in the same period. Satellite and cable transmission allow anyone to create a 'network' in radio or TV."
Even when you strip away all the Internet hype, the landscape for journalists is clearly changing. New places for telling science stories have appeared. A new way of telling those stories is emerging.
"Science journalism will change drastically during the next decade as Web-based interactive multimedia redefines the way information and news are presented," says Jane Stevens, a video journalist with the New York Times TV, a cable television show that is a step toward the newspaper's transition to a multimedia company.
"In the near future-and already in a few places in the present-science journalists must regard themselves less as writers for the printed page and more as story tellers with a plethora of methods-video, text, audio, still photos, interactive graphics and animation-to stimulate curiosity in the amazing worlds within, around and beyond us," she says
To illustrate her point, Stevens pulled together a cross-section of Web-based journalists for the February NASW workshops in Seattle. Here are some different approaches to Web-based writing and publishing from the workshop.
ScienceNOW is the daily online publication of the Science Magazine news service. Edited by Richard Stone, the service posts three to five items each day to the ScienceNOW web site (http://www.sciencenow.org) and two stories a day to Inscight at Academic Press's web site (http://www.apnet.com/inscight). Stone says he soon will be providing items to the JAMA web site. ScienceNOW aims to grow into a bonafide science news service.
The items are original news stories, often pegged to hot papers in the embargoed journals, such as Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet. Other stories are pegged to press conferences, report releases and other breaking science news events.
Stone relies equally on a global network of freelance writers and Science correspondents for his material. Stories run from 100 words (an update of a recent news story) to 300-plus words (stories about complex research findings). Regardless of length, ScienceNOW pays $150 per story. An additional fee will be paid if the story is adapted for use in the print pages of Science. Prospective writers must sign a standard contract.
The Why Files (http://whyfiles.news.wisc.edu) is a biweekly, web-only science magazine showcasing science-behind-the-news. In February, PC Magazine ranked it among the top 100 sites on the World Wide Web. Up to 15,000 readers a week log onto the site, which is published at the University of Wisconsin by the National Institute for Science Education and funded by the National Science Foundation.
"Our strategy is to use curiosity about the news to lure people into reading an online science magazine," says staff writer Dave Tenenbaum. "Our philosophy is to tell a story with a point of view. Our point of view is that science is cool, and you can understand it if the fancy lingo is stripped out."
Tenenbaum, who says the magazine does not use free-lance writers, writes a new feature every two weeks. Every week, editor Terry Devitt posts a new cool science image whose identity readers can guess. Each story contains five to 15 pages of text, drawings, photographs, quizzes, and contests. The site capitalizes on the features of the new medium of the World Wide Web by providing hot links to definitions for scientific jargon, bibliographic references and other relevant sites.
Similar to ScienceNOW's readers, The Why Files audience seems to range from technoliterate scientists killing time on the job to first-time webbers. Readers log in from 100 countries, and many teachers use the site. English may not be the first language. Deciding a level at which to write is an extreme problem, Tenebaum says, and there is no perfect solution.
In some ways, Tenenbaum approaches storytelling on the Web the same as he would for a print journalism feature. He critically evaluates web sources for credibility and usefulness before he'll put a link in the story. He struggles with syntax to communicate clearly and simply without talking down to the reader.
But in other ways, Tenebaum exploits the high tech forum. Feature stories are broken down into smaller parts, which translate into separate Web pages. The first page of the story is essentially a map of what the story contains. Readers can go through the story sequentially or chose any other links and go directly to those pages. Signposts along the way let viewers know where they are in the story.
MSNBC on the Web (http://www.msnbc.com/news/) is a Seattle-area-based, 24-hour news Internet site launched last summer as a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC. MSNBC also broadcasts news from a cable station in New Jersey. Pages are updated every three hours.
Health editor Charlene Laino will be spearheading an effort to merge the health and science sections as part of a larger redesign of the Web site that will feature more color, less scrolling and more navigation. Health and science articles are directed toward the new demographics of the 'Net, which is changing from young techie males to include more middle-aged, less trendy folks and more females, Laino says.
"The state of art web page should be regarded as an interactive magazine article," she says. "And if you're trying to sell me a story, a package will always work better than individual stories."
For example, Laino points to a web story produced in conjunction with the NBC Nightly folks, "Sleepless in America." Viewers e-mailed their dreams; experts interpreted the dreams and posted them on the web site. There was a quiz about what keeps you awake; quizzes are one of the most popular interactive activities at Web-based media sites.
Links are important to Laino. "Anyone who does stories for me is expected to provide good-quality links," Laino says. "I want objective sites, not the site of someone who wrote 'The Melatonin Miracle.' If it's a specific article on cancer, I don't want the NIH home page, I want the National Cancer Institute's page on that particular cancer.
Laino gives higher marks to ideas with Internet angles, stories found in news groups and other places on the Internet, packages complete with video, maps, graphics, and even a willing researcher who will answer questions by phone for an "interactive" web-based question and answer session.
While MSNBC aims for a large general audience, the Web is also the fastest way to present information to specialty audiences. Another group of engineers and editors in the Seattle area is finding success and perhaps even profits in offering a wide range of personal interest groups, including ESPNET SportsZone, Outside Online, and the official sites of the NBA, NFL and NASCAR, says Jeff Herr, managing editor at Outside Online (http://outside.starwave.com).
Outside Online extends the editorial content of New Mexico-based Outside magazine with online-only news stories, political reportage, event coverage, travel advisories and expedition journals. The publication works with an extensive stable of freelance writers, buying short pieces (500-750 words) and paying about $125 (compared to about $500 for a piece of similar length for the monthly paper version).
Web-tracking software tells Outside Online editors that readers are well educated and spend about 10 hours a week on the web. Editors immediately know what the most popular and successful articles are by the number of hits and how long web surfers linger on a particular page. Fast and plentiful reader feedback adds a feeling of community and offers a kind of intimacy among members of that community, Herr reports. That was apparent at the emotional outpouring of readers who followed Outside's chronicles of a Mount Everest expedition last May, when the guide being profiled in the daily online journal died on the mountain.
Herr is looking for "bright and tight" copy, especially for breaking news stories, explanatory narratives or quirky features. "We are always looking for good science stories that are directly relevant to our readers, stories about forest ecosystems, unusual fish and wildlife research, and narratives that explain complex biotic communities," Herr says. "As well, we are interested in stories from the earth sciences, climate research and study of watersheds."
Herr advises writers to think in terms of storytelling in nonlinear form. "Find ways to extend interactive and immediate aspects of a story," he says.
For example, a team of correspondents provided minute-by-minute updates from last year's Tour de France, including feature profiles and video clips from an ESPN crew. Such a technique might be used to cover some sort of exploratory science, Herr says.
Or science writers could adapt a feature from ESPNET SportZone, where readers can access, search and sort through up-to-date, in-depth statistics about ballplayers.
Betsy Aoki, online content development specialist with the new media team at the Seattle Times (http://www.seattletimes.com/) noted that even print publications like newspapers who may be "recycling" items electronically are changing their thinking. Old media web sites are morphing from what Aoki calls "shovelware," or dumping material onto the web in traditional print form, to "savvyware," a term she made up to describe a story designed to take advance of the Web's bag of tricks.
Savvyware lets the user control the story experience. "You have to think nonlinearly in a coherent fashion," she says. The storyteller can only hope to be seductive enough along the way so that the reader will want to follow every step. More online writing advice from Aoki can be found at http://www.seattletimes.com/education/nasw/.
If you thought this article brings you up to date with writing for new media, think again. Just today, I see a promotion for the cover story in the 20 March issue of Wired magazine.
"Sure, we'll always have Web pages," the copy reads. "We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media-increasingly, the center of all media-is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting."
Carol Cruzan Morton is a freelance journalist in El Cerrito, CA, and a science and technology writer for the University of California,Davis.