22 November 1999
PROJ99\SWINWEB.MS
14,400 words
Presentation title: Meet the Web Editors
Moderated by: Beth Schachter
Meeting prospectus: The explosion of Internet publications has created new opportunities for science writers. To acquaint writers, editors and public information officers with these publications, SWINY hosts *Meet the Web Editors*. Some publications are targeted to specialist audiences of scientists, others are geared to general lay audiences. Each editor will provide an overview of the publication and its editorial direction and discuss its freelance opportunities.
CONTENTS:
List of Participants
The Alchemist
HMS Beagle
Discovery Channel Online
MSNBC
PraxisMD
ScienceNOW
21StC
Science & Technology News Network
Questions
Questions:
Expedition?
A: Contact Watson and she'll talk to you
Economic viability?
A: Web sites can make money in many ways
Telecommunting
A: You can telecommute to some jobs but not others
Move up to Science
A: 3 freelancers for ScinceNOW went to Science staff
Clips on paper
A: Editors prefer resumes and clips by fax
All in 300 words?
A: You can tell it in 300 words but it's not easy
Conflict of interest
A: Policies vary
Ghostwriting
A: Not for beginners
Exploitative rates?
A: We don't have the money
Experience
A: At least you'll get experience
Break into TV
A: You're writing for web and TV
Web style
A: Hyperlinks
Contracts--all rights?
A: Not usually
Stories assigned or queried?
A: 50-50
Liz Rawlings
Lois Wingerson
Karen Watson
Charlene Laino
Mary Crowley
Erik Stokstad
William B. Millard
Eliene Augenbraun, DO, PhD
Beth Schachter: We are very fortunate to have people coming from across the Atlantic, Lois Wingreson from across the Brooklyn Bridge, Karen Watson from Discovery On-line, Charlene Laino from MSNBC, Mary Crowley, PraxisMD, Erik Stokstad, ScienceNOW, Bill Millard, from 21stC, which is the Columbia University world of research, and special guest, Eliene Augenbraun, who is from ScienCentral/Science Friday.
Rawlings: Good evening! I am Editorial Manager of The Alchemist, the webzine on ChemWeb.com, an Internet club for chemists. The Alchemist is a free service to the 150,000 members of ChemWeb. Other facilities on the site include a conference diary, library of journals, job exchange and shopping mall. We publish daily news stories and weekly columns and features, on chemistry and related subjects.
The readership of The Alchemist is made up of people working in the chemical industry and pharmaceuticals, university staff, students, research chemists and those working in related fields such as medicine, physics or engineering. The geographic spread is 1/3 in the States, 1/3 in Europe and 1/3 in the rest of the world. Over the past few weeks we have received feedback from readers in Brazil, Nepal and Poland.
We have three in-house editors working on The Alchemist. Tina Walton has a PhD in chemistry and used to work on print journals and Matthew Harkinson has an MSc in Electronic Publishing and a background in reporting.
Biography. My background is in book publishing. I have a degree in Political Studies and worked for ten years in print publishing editing fiction, non-fiction and journals. Three years ago I took a freelance job at News International on their joint project with British Telecom to create web channels for the LineOne ISP. I have been working on The Alchemist since before it launched in 1997. Each of us commissions and edits a section of the webzine, and we have a
group email address
for ideas and contributions.
Out-of-house, we have a core group of about ten regular news and feature writers and probably another 20 intermittent contributors. They are located in the US, UK and Europe--including Italy, Holland, Ireland, Spain and Russia.
News covers research breakthroughs, industry developments, pharmaceuticals, environment, policy, education, and events. We like journalists to send 100-200 word proposals by email summarising the story and giving sources where appropriate. Obviously they have to come within a broad definition of chemistry. Recent news items have covered a new pill for flu, the merger possibilities for pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert, research into the use of hydrogen as a fuel, a report on ecological conditions in the former Yugoslavian territory and proposed new controls on advertisements for skin products. Each week we have an Industry news in brief column and every fortnight an education column, which has recently been on chemical education on the Internet.
We have several regular columns including interviews with eminent chemists in "Getting Personal", chemistry as applied to archeology and the environment in "In the Field", Molmodelling, Chemometrics and general chemistry features in "Catalyst" and "Spotlight."
Once we have accepted a proposal for news, the deadline is between a day and a week, depending on the time required to research and write the article and how date-sensitive it is. The deadlines for features vary from less than a week for a news-linked piece to a month for less time-sensitive features.
We also publish book reviews, both chemistry and popular science, reviews of websites, chemistry journals and discussion groups, conference reports and cartoons. Some of these are written in-house although we are always looking for book reviewers and people to report on conferences.
Our freelance rates, probably not great by U.S. standards, are $370 per 1,000 words for news or features and $170 per book review.
We receive a large number of press releases, increasingly via email and from newsgroups. The ones we tend to use are those with a research bias, rather than ones about industry moves or new products. We also occasionally run advertorials. Revenue comes from banner advertising on the site.
Marketing The Alchemist is mostly through ChemWeb.com with links from the Homepage, Meetings page and Forums and a weekly mailer to members highlighting new content. We also run a Young Chemistry Writer of the Year Award, which is open to members in the 16-30 year bracket and was won this year by a 19-year-old student from Scripps Research Institute La Jolla California, for his essay on superbugs and antibiotics. Another promotional activity this year was a collaboration with our sister publication, HMS Beagle, to webcast the Ignobel Awards.
Wingerson: There is a staff of 7 people and an army of freelancers that work for HMS Beagle.
HMS Beagle is located on the portal site biomednet.com, which has lots of wonderful resources for laboratory-based biologists, 500,000 of them.
And they really are laboratory based cell biologists, people like that, and a fair proportion, 30%, are in clinical medicine, many of them in clinical research but interested in the molecular biology side of things.
HMS Beagle is a daily and biweekly publication. We have daily abstracts of journals so that scientists can see what's happening in the journals and link to them. It saves them reading through the pile. Those are updated daily, and three is also a lot of biweekly content which is dear to our hearts: Commentary, meeting briefs, career advice, opinions, fiction, humor. It's lateral thinking. It's fun for biologists. It's something they can do on-line in the lab. It looks legit but it's actually fun. We get about 250,000 hits per biweekly issue.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about our editorial procedures, because I spent a lot of time creating packets with all that information.
I've included a copy of our author's instructions, that would come along with the contract, if you were to get an assignment from us. That would tell you exactly what you need to know about submitting.
["Submission Guidelines for Journalist-Authors" lists 5 categories of articles:
Optimum length 1,000-1,100 words. Absolute limit of 1,500 words. Writers should fax a resume and 3 clips.
Endlinks, of 5-6 urls, are paid an additional fee.]
And I give you a lot from the
media pack
about what our audience is.
I did that because I wanted to save a little time for tangential issues that are of importance to writers.
Elsevier and HMS Beagle, and also Alchemist, which is our sister publication for chemists, are kind of a departure for our parent company, which is I think the largest science publisher in the world. [
Elsevier NV
is the joint owner, with Reed International P.L.C., of
Reed Elsevier plc
]
Elsevier was publishing manuscripts for Galileo in the 1500s, it's a really old publishing company, so the whole on-line business is a complete departure for them. And it's interesting working in a journal environment, as a web editor. Elsevier has been very forward-looking in trying to find ways to use the on-line environment. They started long ago anticipating what would be happening with Biomed Central and the consolidation of free web content on line. They're willing to look at lateral ways to get at their traditional audience of scientists, so they spent a lot of time in the last year thinking of the future of scientific publishing.
And what they came up with, which I'm delighted to come up with in my role as a science journalist is that it's a wonderful time to be a science journalist. Because there's going to be a growing demand for what is called tertiary content, the need for people to interpret in easily accessible ways this mass of information that's going to be suddenly available, to help find out and translate the best of what is being published, now that anything can be published anywhere. So for those of you that are starting out this is a great time to be coming into the profession.
We do not want our authors to code. If our authors send in coded documents we have to recode them because we have coding peculiarities in Beagle. You might be more attractive to some webzine for a full-time job.
But if you're considering freelancing, focus on the thing you always would focus on, that is being the best science writer or the best science public information officer you can be, because whatever they say, content is king, it's becoming more and more king.
We want to have the best science writing and the best-informed knowledge we can get on line. Our coding we can do ourselves.
And more to that point. The industry is moving more to the point where we want to know what the meta-data is so that we can shift it around in various ways. And repurpose it. We want a clearer way to know what the title and what the subtitle is, and to do artificial intelligence on-line, which requires a new kind of coding.
And the result that comes up to our daily headline writers is, we don't like to accept just emailed copy any more. We like to have you to look on a dedicated web site and submit copy to a template. It's a little like going on an ATM machine. You enter the title here, your byline here, your text in this box. It doesn't sound too complicated. One complication is that you've got to have the technology that's compatible with the templating.
At present we have very good headline writers who are good journalists, who hate it, they find it very claustrophobic. And they're cutting and pasting into the template. Or they hate the template, and they refuse to do it. We will live with that, if it's a good writer, if it's a really hot news writer who knows the business. We will do it manually ourselves. We're paying somebody to do it. Because it's worth it for the good writer.
The way I see the industry going is that you're going to need to get used to writing into that template. So you don't need to code, but the more friendly you can be in your mind, the more you can understand your machine the better it'll probably be.
As to writing style, briefer is better. People don't like to read a lot on-screen. But that's always true anyway. And we have a suspicion from our staff that people are actually printing out a lot of what they read on Beagle.
Biography. I was a freelance science journalist for many years, had jobs at Newsday, Discover and New Scientist. I've always been a science writer until my job before HMS Beagle, when I became a print editor and went from newsletters into CD-ROM, which I don't recommend for anybody. But fortunately it gave me the computer skills to get this wonderful job at HMS Beagle.
I'm Karen Watson, I'm a producer at Discovery Channel Online. Used to be an editor. I'll tell you some of the direction that this business is going.
Discovery Channel Online is 4 years old this past summer. It's gone through lots of changes over the past few years. We're growing, which is the good news, and we're hungry for freelancers to fill our various niches, and we have many of them.
This summer we opened a brand new web site called Discovery Health.com. And they're looking for folks.
I work with the Discovery Channel site itself which focuses on science, technology, nature, history and exploration.
Our audience is popular. We're not aimed at writing for other science writers or other scientists. In fact, we don't even like to call our stories science stories. They're stories of intellectual exploration.
Discovery's motto is, "Explore Your World." It's intellectual adventuring. And the breadth of what we have on the site reflects that.
We have on-line expeditions. This summer I produced an expedition where we had a writer in the field above the Arctic circle in Alaska digging for
Polar dinosaur bones
.
And every morning I would pull out my danish and coffee, he had uploaded the night before, by sat phone, images and a dispatch, and my treat was to be able to get there and read first what he was filing, and really glad I wasn't up there freezing my butt off and fighting back mosquitoes. But he had a fabulous time. And it was my pleasure to edit him, pull together the media, and upload it that day. And we did daily dispatches for the course of 2 weeks.
As part of that package, the expedition package, we also did a special on dinosaur sounds. We're multi-media, we have really wonderful audio clips on dinosaur sound.
Dinosaur motion. Using video clips from various researchers who have reproduced what they think is the mechanical motion of various dinosaurs using computer modeling.
So we're using multi-media to give another dimension to science story-telling, and that's very much our hallmark and trademark. We also have features on the site which are shorter than our big expedition packages.
Right now if you go to our site we have 2 expeditions.
One, we had a guy, Jim Milusa, who is on his fourth expedition, he bike rides to the lowest points on the different continents in the planet. Right now he's in
Patagonia.
And he files pretty much daily dispatches about life in these different places. Last year he went to Russia. Really fabulous story-telling. Really wonderful, first-person, telling us as it is. Raw stuff, folks are traveling and filing that night.
We also have a writer in India who is covering the saga of the
tigers in India
, and she believes that in many ways the fate of the tiger and whether or not it's going to survive on our planet will be determined on that country.
And she actually SAW a TIGER in the wild, and she got a
PICTURE
of the tiger in the wild, and we HAVE IT on the site. It's wonderful!
And that's the image we're trying to convey. What is it like to do science? What is it like to get up in the morning and dig for dinosaur bones?
Science stories
We also have a daily offering typically 6-7 science stories. Half of those are freelance stories, half of those are wire service. We're growing our news department, we're always looking for freelancers in that area. They're typically about 350 words in length, we pay about $200. We pay more if you're in the field covering a conference, we pay more if you're hustling on a fast turnaround deadline. The editor for that is
Lori Cuthbert
and I put her card here. Again the areas that we cover on that daily news site are science, technology, history, exploration, and nature.
We are interested in stuff that's being published in the journals, we're interested in people who cover conferences and file from the conferences.
We're really interested in your working your neck of the woods, if you will, find out out what's going on in your different research institutions. We have people around the world who are filing for us. And it's very productive if you're not just filing off EurekAlert and some of the things that everybody gets. We're really looking for some elbow grease and folks who are willing to show some initiative.
We pay for the newsbriefs a little bit lower than that, about $150.
We are a good place for starting journalists to begin. We don't have flat rates on any of our coverage, either for expedition, or features, or newsbrief, in part because we do some training of journalists that are coming in. We require a certain level of experience, but because on-line journalism is a different creature, we're investing in you. We're spending quite a bit of time with you. We bring people to Washington DC, we teach you how to use the laptops, the equipment that we have, how to be able to transfer your files. We teach you how to use a satellite phone, we teach you how to use a video camera, we teach you how to use a digital camera. If you're interested in those kinds of things and are excited about going into the field those are the folks that we're looking for in the expedition area.
The net is a good place for junior writers AND seasoned writers interested in learning a new medium. at discovery.com we have a healthy mix of the two and invest especially in training seasoned writers in multimedia storytelling.
Biography. I studied biology in my last year, I decided that really in my heart I was a Victorian naturalist and I was born in the wrong century, so I went back to the graduate program at UC-Santa Cruz which tends to put out a lot of the science writers these days. Ended up doing some newspapering, public information for a university, discovered the web in '95, taught myself HTML, learned authoring programs, created data bases and major web sites for the university where I was working. Was lucky enough to discover a spot at Discovery and jumped ship in order to do on-line journalism.
It's really an amazing place to be. It's frontier. And there's more to come. There's broad-band, there's convergence. It's an extraordinary place to be.
Laino: MSNBC on the Internet is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft. We also have a sister cable station that you can see here in New York, MSNBC cable, and of course we work closely with our NBC affiliate.
Seeing that we're now the
number 1 news site,
we're doing better than
cnn.com
,
abcnews.com
,
nytimes.com
, any of them in terms of number of visitors we get per month.
The big surprise has been health and science at MSNBC. When they launched--I joined them right after they launched 3 years ago--they didn't even have a health section. They were running some of my stories from the wire where I was working [
Medical Tribune
]. I suggested it, they took me on. First it was in the living section, then we moved it to the news section, and it was growing so popular that over a year ago now we re-launched health as its own separate section. Just as news is a section and commerce is a section, health is a top-level section now of MSNBC on the Internet.
That's given us a lot of opportunity to expand in every direction. Science and space and environment are subsections of the news section, and technology is also its own section. And I'll give you contacts in all of those different areas.
So needless to say things have really changed since launch 3 years ago. We're constantly evolving, even to this day.
There are sometimes when I still do articles like I do in print, or when I work for a wire, when I cover a meeting like the American Heart Association.
But in general we're constantly trying to figure out how to tell stories in a more interactive manner. How to integrate multi-media, how to engage the reader, also trying to operate in sync with MSNBC and NBC Cable in any way we can.
Similarly when we do packages, which are 3-4 different stories on the topic, we find that 6-8 elements including quizzes, surveys and everything is best. We can package them all together using a little box so the reader can click through. You really don't want to get much more than that or it's unmanageable. There's no point to all this work.
But most importantly, remember that telling a good story on the web isn't always like it is in print. We want to tell it in a non-linear manner. You want to get the reader to click through it. So that means telling a sidebar in a different way than you might. It means pulling out some things that you would normally make bullets and making a little box out of them. You should look at different web sites and see how they accomplish them, without a story that goes on and on and on.
There's a good example you could look at. There's a nice package called
Glory Days
by our space editor on our site, that's on the space section of news.
There are some traditional articles but we also tell the story through the sights and sounds of America's space saga. You could click on various mission titles and get a video about them. Surround videos let you actually sit at the launch director's station. You can zoom in and out. See what it's like to sit in one. That's kind of fun to do.
So anyway we feel that telling a package in a way like this gives you a lot more than the traditional linear story would.
Audio and video have really changed things. You do audio all the time. It could be of an expert, it could be of an NBC correspondent, it could be even of the author of the story, you, if you're an expert enough on the topic. The thing to do is to add something to the story. Not to repeat what you already said in the line. But you don't actually have to tape the audio for us. We can do that, when you pitch a story, if you say "I don't mind lining up Dr. so-and-so for a 2pm audio session." It takes 5 minutes. That will give you an edge.
We like things that will make it easy. There's only 3 of us in the health department. We just added a third person so she's still being trained. So we need all the help we can get from you guys.
Videos have really changed things in the last couple of years. It used to be you had to worry about the size of a video clip, but new technology makes it as easy to download a 2-second clip as a 30-minute clip. So suggest a video if you can think of something that would go along with your piece. A lot of times doctors or researchers have videos, they've done something in the lab. Get it shipped along to us.
So what else should you be thinking if you pitch a story to us?
And also think packages more than individual stories, because I'm more likely to use freelancers for a package-type deal.
Something like a survey is popular. In our big abortion package, the most popular thing was a survey. So if you're willing along with your story to write up 8 quick questions, what are your thoughts on this and this and this, and give us some different choices, that's pitching me something that I can go to the interactive producers. They'll code it for you. You just have to give me the words.
We've done timelines. We've done timelines of the different things that led up to cloning. A timeline of
influenza
.
So if you're willing to go back and do a little research again that will give you an edge.
State by state maps we do a lot. We have a map that shows flu rates or AIDS rates in every state. Even better, we do an infectious disease one from around the world.
Quizzes. Especially
risk assessment
.
Are you at risk of heart disease, are you at risk of diabetes? These need a little more work. You have to talk to researchers, make sure you have the risk factors weighed the right way. Very important.
Web TV is changing things. We're working more and more closely with NBC to do background on stories, so I might be using freelancers for some of that material, where I just need a lot of background on a different disease. So if Bob Bazell reports on some news development in heart disease that the web TV uses you can go up and get all sorts of background.
I'm going to have to run. I actually have to get back to work.
To contact us my cards are out there. I'm
<charlene.laino@msnbc.com>.
The science and space editor is
<alan.boyle@msnbc.com>
.
The technology editor is
<mark.stevenson@msnbc.com>
.
I generally pay about 75 cents a word. However if you're doing a whole package for me and throwing things in like a quiz or a survey it usually ups the price, something that would have been $750 I'll give you $1,000. It's all negotiable depending on what you're giving me. I have 1 journalist who also does video for us so that ups the price.
Biography. I've been with MSNBC since launch. Before that I worked for the Med Trib news service which provided the daily medical news stories for the New York Times syndicate. Executive editor there. Before that I worked in the trades and was a freelancer.
Schachter: We'll take a couple of questions [because Laino won't be around for the regular question period].
Q: When you say a package I'm not sure what you're looking for. Like 4 short stories plus time line plus this plus that?
Laino: Exactly.
Q: What does your clip book look like. Is it on a zip file?
Laino: I don't have a clip book because I'm so happy with my job. I think you could do it that way. Yes. I think that would be a good idea.
Q: It seems to me that as a former freelance writer you have an obligation to tell them that they should be paying more.
Laino: I will tell them that.
Q: How are you differentiating health and science?
Laino: Because health is its own section, and science is a subsection of news, we tend to actually take a few more of the articles into health that you might generally think of as science. For example we do cloning and genetics as health. You can get a better idea of it by looking at the health library on the site.
But it's broadly defined. And a lot of times it overlaps, even with technology too. And we can link to each other's sections, so it's not a big deal. So if you pitch something to me, like genetically modified foods we covered first in the health section, now of all things we're doing it in the international section because of the international debates.
You can contact me about anything that you think might fall under health.
Q: Are there any areas that you're particularly interested in getting stories on.
I could say that web readers tend to like really cutting edge articles. They don't care if it's in the rat or the mouse. They like to read about something even if it's not going to be in humans for 20 years. They really like to know what's right on the cutting edge. But we cover everything. Heart disease, cancer. We do it all.
Q: How much is added to the price for slide and video?
Laino: I don't have a set rate, I would work it out with you. I'm always as fair as I can be.
Q: Still 75 cents a word?
Laino: Roughly but like I said probably with the video it would be more like a dollar a word. Because it would go from a $750 word piece to a $1,000-word piece.
Q: How are you gaging your readership? Just by hits, by section? Do you measure dwell?
Laino: We do several things. The only thing that counts on the web are
Media Metrix
ratings, as far as the whole site goes. That's where they do count how many people come with page view and stay on the page. [See the Media Metrix
Top 10 Health Sites
.]
But we do have this cute little thing on the bottom of each story where you can vote on it, 1-7, based on whether you like the story, which goes into the quote unquote
top ten
.
And health and space stories are always in the top 10. People love them.
But you don't know who voted or what percentage of readers voted.
So the only thing that counts is the Media Metrix ratings. They're sort of like the Nielson of the web.
Q: I'm starting out in this area and I'm wondering MSNBC, do they generally work with established writers, or are they also open to newcomers who show strong writing?
Laino: I'm open to ANYTHING. You pitch me right, we'll be open.
I'm not as well known as most of these sites up here. Praxis.MD, not dot com, is a medical web site. [Note: The extension .md is the country code for Moldova; U.S. physicians sometimes register their site in
Moldova
.]
Our subtitle is, "Practical answers for physicians and patients."
We're relatively new. A year ago we were sitting around the dining room table of my boss and publisher in Park Slope, Brooklyn, drawing things, trying to figure out our editorial policies. I'm the editorial director by the way.
The publisher of the company is Sarah Green who was Lois' boss for a while. She was the president of Biomednet and the founder of HMS Beagle. Vitek Tracz, who is the owner of Biomednet and sold it to Elsevier, is also the owner of Praxis Press. So we've got some good background behind us.
We want to make a resource which is really web-friendly, as somebody here said, really the two-screen kind of look. So a reference has to have a front end and underneath, almost like a stack of cards. You drill in. So in a way you're writing many little articles. So we're taking this journal and we're redoing it entirely.
Then they will produce something in quite a structured template.
You were talking about writing into a template. This will be a demand of the assignment. We're going to be creating something so that for the web purposes it's easy to access the information. Each of the pieces is a drill-down. So these are anchoring into a deeper level of the article which tells you about the hows and whys of each piece.
So it's quite a craft. It's interesting challenge, kind of a wordsmithy challenge. That's one of the things we're looking for writers for. This is a big medical comprehensive reference.
Each of these articles is going to be integrated into patient information. So people who have experience in taking complicated medical information, creating consumer-friendly articles--we'll be doing the same thing with that. Again with the same kind of drill-down effect. There will be a structured overview.
That takes a different kind of skill in my experience. The person writing for the physician and the person writing for the patient often have 2 very kinds of skill, both equally valuable.
The webzine will be more of a lifestyle kind of fun look at medicine. We're going to have features, debates, profiles. Joshua Lederberg will be one of our first profiles.
We've got a fun little thing called "The Stan and Rosanne Show." Stan is an intensivist at Tufts up in Boston, and Rosanne is a nun-physician in a rural setting in Alabama, and they're emailing each other their experiences, kind of like Slate on-line debates. We hope they fall in love and get married. It's like a whole soap opera. We'll see if that happens. That will really be good. In our preliminary email exchanges with them it has really been quite extraordinary. They really are having this unique sharing.
We have some contacts in Turkey, we're going to have some international physicians who are abroad writing about some of the hot zones they're in. Turkey, of course the aftermath of the earthquake, and now with the second earthquake, kind of dropped off the news radar.
But we are looking for profiles, interesting features, it's somewhat open at this point because it's relatively new. So we need writers for all these things.
The people who are interested in doing any of the reference-kind of writing--the big physician on-line encyclopedia--the person to contact is our executive editor, Erin Michael Kelly. He's erin@praxismd.com. (or Erin@praxispress.com)
People interested in writing for the paper reference as well should contact Erin.
You can contact me about the links or anything to do with the webzine. That's
Biography. I come out of a print background, in health and medical publishing for about 20 years. I've done big books, Time-Life series, I was the founding editor of the Johns Hopkins "Health After 50" newsletter. I did a lot of freelance writing for different publications--New York Magazine, Newsweek, Glamour--and I was med head writer for Beagle for many years which got me into the Internet angle of things. And I really love it. So I encourage everybody to try it. You can go back and forth easily.
Biography. I never expected to be dealing with daily deadlines and didn't expect to be doing it on-line, but back in 1994 I was casting around for something to do with a masters degree in geology that did not involve offshore oil rigs or inspecting leaking gasoline tanks in the Greater Los Angeles basin.
So like many many people in the business I went through John Wilkes' program. And when I was done with that I did 6 months internship with New Scientist, and after that I did a 6 month internship with Science. It was sort of my post-doc without the doc.
But as an intern at Science I was doing mostly writing short news stories on-line for something they had just started out called ScienceNOW. Then to help out the editor I was editing them 1 day a week.
And it turned out that when my internship ended he left the job and I slipped into it. So for the last 2 1/2 years I've been editing ScienceNOW. And what that involves is commissioning and editing and posting 5-6 stories a day. The kind of stories we do are mainly the sort of stories you would read in Science. Basic "explain the research and why it's important."
The audience is for the most part the same, which means they're explaining a breakthrough in biology so that a physicist would be interested and vice versa, which is the harder way to go.
We also do science policy things that are going to affect the scientific community. Most of those that appear on ScienceNOW are done in-house by our staff news writers.
But the majority of the research ones are freelanced out.
We have a small group of regular people. And then a larger group of people who do things more occasionally.
We're always looking for new talent because the best people seem to get jobs.
If you want to pitch a story to ScienceNOW the best way to do it is to find something that isn't floating around the web, that isn't in a major journal, because we check those, we assign the ones we like. So Science, Nature, the Nature monthlies, JAMA, NEJM, all of those we're checking. They are on our radar screen.
The things that are likely to be accepted as pitches are coming from journals that are below that radar screen. Maybe you have a specialty you're watching, ecology or an astronomy journals that I don't have time to check. If you see a story in there that looks like it might be of broad interest, we'd like to hear about it.
If you have a conference that's local and you're going and hear something that might make a short research brief, we'd like to know about it.
[Groans from audience at the low pay.]
That's right.
All this is spelled out in more detail in a handout that's over there. Plus my business cards.
[According to the handout, they want to expand their coverage in physics, archaeology, organismal biology, and ecology. Another Science website that takes freelance is Science's
Next Wave
, a weekly online publication that covers scientific training, career development, and the science job market. Contact senior editor
Nichole Ruediger
.]
21stC began about 5 years ago with the perception of some of the more forward-thinking people in the administration and faculty at Columbia that research universities are not widely understood, but they're incredibly socially important, and more of the populace should know what goes on in them. And more of the populace WANT to know what goes on in them. And also people within research universities don't know what their colleagues are doing. The guy in philosophy doesn't know what the lady in biophysics is doing. And vice versa.
So 21stC was launched as an attempt to communicate across various borders, first borders within the universities internally, to inform people in different departments in Columbia what's going on in other fields. How the intellectual hybridization that allows intellectual progress, what ideas are feeding into those hybrid thoughts. Also across the border between the university and the outside world. Let the general informed citizen know what's going on in these large somewhat mystifying institutions.
And we've found surprisingly strong response to this. It's not just an institutional publication. We're not just internal. We're not strictly a house organ, and we're certainly not a promotional magazine. We've managed to be both internal and external.
And we've managed to reach a whole series of different audiences, which we view as a series of concentric circles, beginning with the Columbia research faculty, at our various campuses, Morningside, Lamont-Doherty, Biosphere 2 which is now a branch of Columbia's institute out in Arizona. And the Health Sciences campus uptown. We start with those audiences and then we move out to other institutions, to the media, to people in government that have anything to do with research policy, and all the way out to the general public. So our audience is a big target with Columbia in the center.
We emphasize interdisciplinary work. We emphasize ideas that unite disciplines that you wouldn't think had anything to do with each other.
Now in about 4 years of publishing this as both a print and on-line magazine, we've had certain successes. We're still small. We recently took a study and a survey, a formal process to see how we're being received.
We're going to reinvent the whole thing. So a lot of what I'm saying about the existing 21stC is going to change. And until certain formal funding decisions are taken I can't get too specific.
But 21stC as it exists right now has basically 3 important departments.
They always have some Columbia focus but not exclusively. As long as there's some plausible connection to the Columbia Research enterprise, sources from outside our own university are welcomed and actively sought.
Our writers include both freelance writers and members of the Columbia faculty, occasionally the faculty of other universities. We've had pieces by university presidents elsewhere.
We can do for the research world what something like
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting
does for the political world. [Note: FAIR pays 15 cents a word.]
Monitor the press. Gage the performance of the research media. When the research stories are out there we have the experts in the relevant fields analyze these things. They can say, well, this was handled pretty well. These publications did a responsible job. These sensationalized it or overlooked it or whatever.
That department we termed Metanews, which will definitely continue in the reborn 21stC, that's been one of our defining features.
And those pieces are briefs, about 500 to 800 words on the average. Those are often the places we try out new writers. If somebody can handle a shorter metanews media critique assignment then they'll often stay with us and get larger feature pieces.
You wouldn't think of Columbia as an ag school but we do have some of that out in Arizona. And then some discussion of earth science work being done in Lamont. And perspectives on that topic from many different disciplines.
We did one called Strange Science, and that's among the issues I brought on the table, looking at pseudosciences, looking at alternative medicine, and efforts at the university and elsewhere to sort out what's scientific rigor and what's bunkum.
We led off that piece with an extensive theoretical piece by one of our chemistry professors, Nicholas Turro. Towards a General Theory of Pathological Science, analyzing cases where scientific research went wrong. The cold fusion case and others. And that's been enormously popular.
So the special sections will continue these clusters of pieces, generally about 1,000 words each. Those will go on in the new 21stC although they might not be clustered in the same issue.
The new edition of 21stC will change from a print magazine that also exists on the web, where the same thing comes out in print and the web edition appears as one big bolus, where the web articles will be longer, and are heavily hypertextual, we put a lot of effort into linking.
The new version will be rotating constantly, we'll be updating the site every day. We'll be putting a new larger article up there and new articles will be adding into the mix, approximately every 2 weeks, also with news feeds on a daily basis. So our site will change on a daily basis and people will keep coming back more often.
Some of the other specifics. We generate some topics in-house, we also welcome submissions from outside, over the transom. [Some of the ideas will come from] some of our faculty honchos, but we welcome your ideas as well. And once we are reborn online there will be less of a backlog and a lot more frequent publication.
I'm the sole contact.
We currently pay:
So it roughly works out to a buck a word. I'm astounded to find out that we pay slightly more competitively than Microsoft. But one of the structural changes I'll be advocating as we solidify our plans for the new 21stC as an online entity is better pay for our writers.
Our sources are always, there's always somebody from Columbia, but there doesn't have to be. We encourage sources from internal and external. We don't micro-manage you but we do guide you towards the Columbia people who are most informed in the topic.
We try to favor a tone that's sort of knowing and a little bit edgy or wise-ass or snarky. We want to be a little bit iconoclastic.
We are not a promotional magazine. The university has several of those, they do their work really well, we don't want to compete with them.
Instead we see ourselves as offering commentary.
The metaphor that we might use is that the university is a multi-gated city. There are a lot of ways in. 21stC is one of those gates.
It's the coffee house. It's where you go to contemplate research--not necessarily to look at the nuts and bolts of scholarship in the sciences, but to think about its implications. To think about how different fields bounce off each other.
We like contemplative interpretive writing. We give our authors a pretty long leash.
Biography. Background. I come to Columbia after 4 years writing commercial medical journal work for a controlled circulation magazine for primary care doctors. Before that various freelance projects, cultural writing. Grad school in English and American lit. So I come in through the back door, like most of us do.
Augenbraun: I'm from
ScienCentral
and we make television and web science and technology news. And you guys probably all know my business partner, Ira Flatow. So this is our TV and web venture.
I want to tell you a little bit about our 2-minute TV news pieces, because the web pieces for which we typically hire freelancers is the web site associated with those 2-minute TV news pieces.
It's kind of public TV on the commercial networks. These are distributed by ABC News to all the local affiliates in the U.S. So a typical story will be on the 6 o'clock news or the 11 o'clock news.
Our web site is intended to give more information, at the moment, to the producers of those 2-minute news stories.
And we've been doing a sort of sneaky pilot in developing articles that we're now about to convert to a public web site.
And what these stories look like, I guess they're closest to Discovery or MSNBC stories, but they're also a little bit different and we're still experimenting with the best way to make what's not really a web theme--it's supposed to complement and expand on a television news theme.
A couple of other things about our company. We also produce
sciencefriday.com
and we also have a lot of experience producing things that are associated with broadcast, but we never use freelancers there so I won't talk about it.
So if there's anybody there who can write really good science news in Spanish, we love you.
Let me tell you how we pay. I was sitting here quite miserable about how we pay freelancers. Don't go to Science, come to us.
Stokstad: It's a free market.
Augenbraun: What we've been doing up till now, we've been hiring basically interns and we pay them $100 a story, and we train them in a lot of production, and for experienced people who can really interact with us seamlessly we'll pay $200 a story. And we don't really use a lot of freelancers. At the moment we do not need any but probably in a couple of months we will.
We will be expanding our web site as we expand our TV news service. Especially for Spanish language, we're looking for people now.
Our typical web story is a combination of multimedia video and audio.
One of the things we train people on is video editing for the web.
The technology you have sitting on your desk will probably influence whether we would use you or not.
Biography. My background is I'm a physician and biologist by training. I went to med school to be a medical illustrator, and I did that 12 years. If you think you guys are paid poorly try being a medical illustrator. They don't pay by the line. If they paid by the gray hairs I'd be rich.
But I actually practiced science as a living and I made much more money as an artist than as a scientist. So I went into science policy and now I'm running this company.
I'm the general manager of Science and Technology News Network and the CEO of our company.
I don't have too many cards, but I can throw them at you and if you hable espanol you get 2.
Schachter: I did ask the panel if they could hang around till 9:00. And please speak loudly.
Watson: Why don't you contact me and we'll talk about it.
We do entertain all sorts of wild ideas. I'd need to get a sense of some of your seasoning, how much is already there.
Rawlings: Our site is not making money at the moment but our revenues from advertising increases as the membership goes up, and as the usage goes up, because the way the sales reps sell the advertising, there'll be so many hits on that banner.
Watson: Discovery wants several things out of the web. The history of the Discovery Channel--it was founded 14 years ago by a gentleman named John Hendricks, he was a corporate development officer for the University of Maryland. He had this great idea that he tried to peddle to the networks, for 24-hour documentary programming. Nobody took it. He found investors and now he has a company that is worth more than a billion dollars. He believes that the Internet is a similar kind of concept, and he's sinking truckloads of money into online, looking at broadband, looking at convergent technology. Looks at the web not only as e-commerce. Discovery owns over 100 stores, has catalog operations, we have e-commerce on the site. We also sell advertising. We also have services. We have Discovery Explore Your World travel services.
It's also tied to programming, it's a way of enhancing what you have on broadcast. You're able to throw to online, people want additional information. They're able to get different experiences than the traditional TV experience.
It's a way of having a beefier product, if you will, overall. So there are many different reasons for investing in this, at least for Discovery.
Augenbraun: Let me say this as a small independent guy. I just came back from a meeting of the World Congress Of Science Producers in London. We were mostly television but about a third were web.
Small independents like us probably will not survive as we're currently constituted, and it's the Discoveries that will survive, but I think we'll survive as sections. Just as TV production companies of a certain size, there'll probably be TV production companies of 4 guys that make beautiful documentaries.
But for freelance work on a large scale right now is the golden age to work with independent producers. If they're independent they'll be bought by somebody else. I think it's a great time to take a chance 'cause you can't lose.
Wingerson: Also I'd like to raise one more point to that.
A lot of our users don't even realize that ads are ads. They think that this is just more neat content that we put up. I'm not kidding. That's frightening to me as an editor. Because I work very hard to try to make clear what is an ad.
But there are lots of ways to bring money in through links. People don't realize that a link can be paid for or not paid for.
For example, in our software review section we hope to be able to sell the opportunity for the software advertiser to print a profile of his company.
We sponsored the email shot that goes out telling every week what the contents are. There's a little ad on there.
We also get commissions on journal articles, every time a scientist decides to buy an article on Biomednet because we have these huge databases.
We're not breaking even yet but we're projected that we will.
Crowley: We're looking for staff people. We're looking for an associate editor for the patient care information. The jobs that we've looked for are posted in the usual places. As well as on the NASW web site, the AMWA site, webgirrls, silicon.alley.com. So I think there's often a segue from freelancer into a staff position. A lot of freelance writers like myself have been editors and go back and forth. I don't think it's unheard of or even hard to do.
Q: That has to be someone who is working in-house.
Crowley: Yes.
Q: That's the thing I find amazing about this technology. Why does it have to be in-house?
Wingerson: We are very flexible with our staff working at home. We don't care as long as you get your work in.
Biomednet is headquartered in London, and Beagle is located in New York, and therefore I in a sense telecommute from New York to London. I commute more to London than I sometimes wish I did.
But I can't tell you how difficult it is to operate under that environment. How much I miss daily contact with the overall editor of Biomednet.
As we all know email is not the same as talking. Ideas don't float around as much as standing around the coffee maker. And I could certainly deem for myself that I'm going to work at home 4 days a week. But for all the wonders of the technology there's nothing like face to face. Day to day.
Augenbraun: I'm going to disagree. Our company started as a virtual company. Ira was in Stamford, Connecticut, and I was in Washington DC, and would file stories from wherever I traveled to all around the world. Then we used to hire more freelancers and had them working in one place. We go through trends.
Our web editor works from his house in his broken foot and it hasn't stopped anything. He set up a whole web production facility in his own house and it was great. Because it forced us to answer certain technology questions that we wouldn't before.
I just signed a lease on Friday for our first stab at New York real estate, and when I started calculating out how much it will cost me having a person sitting at a desk, I love to have people working from their home in Seattle, Arizona, Alaska.... We do have freelancers working all around the country. Freelancers and staff. We have a staff person working in Rochester, New York. We have staff working all over the place.
Wingerson: Well that's it. We have 7 or 8 contract editors.
Q: Is the staff editor in Rochester somebody that you have seen and worked with before?
Augenbraun: I hired her sight unseen, I've met her 4-5 times.
It depends on the personality. She's one of these people who's on the phone all the time and she's effective and great.
It depends on the person, the situation, and the time. There will be a moment in time in which I'm going to want everybody in the office for a month. Everybody.
Stokstad: There are 2 people on staff at Science in the news department who began by writing regularly for ScienceNOW. And once they had done that enough, the print news editor started to take notice, commissioned print pieces for them, they impressed the print editors enough that they got hired. 3 people, one persons now at NPR, first came to the attention of the print editor.
Wingerson: That's OK. I request clips in fact. I keep a paper file on journalists.
Stokstad: It's hard work on the editing. Yeah.
Q: The abstract itself is 300 words long. How can you possibly?
Stokstad: Read some and see. See how it works for you. There's a regular formula we use.
Q: They're so technical in the magazine. Are they technical on the web site?
Stokstad: They're meant to be lively and accessible. Take a look and email me if you think it works.
[Note: Some experienced writers have complained that the ScienceNOW pieces were indeed difficult.]
Millard: Speaking to academic research we welcome them. We have Columbia research faculty writing for us all the time and since we're a university publication there's no conflict there. If we were to get an article from a freelancer who did not disclose their ties with industrial interests, I think conflicts would be perceived. Are you referring to financial conflict of interest, or--
Q: No just research interest. Suppose I worked for Inclone and I write a freelance article about cancer cloning. Would that come back later with legal problems?
Millard: I don't think so if it's fully disclosed.
Stokstad: Yes. To give you an example. I have a freelance editor who half-time edits a newsletter for advancing neuroscience. She does a great job but to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest she doesn't write about neuroscience. She writes about lots of other things. As long as it's in the open.
Crowley: It's a ghost-written effort. The physician's name is the author but they're written by the medical writer.
Q: You get $2,000 for the article?
Crowley: Yes. The physician gets $200.
Q: [Is your name on the article, or how do you get credit for it?]
Crowley: We have a list of contributors. We're just starting so we're trying to figure out how to deal with it--to put the contributor's name with the article or how to work it.
Q: How long are they?
Crowley: I don't have a word count but they're about 25-30 MS pages.
Q: Do the doctors supply all the information?
Crowley: No. We supply you the reference package, and you contact the physician and interview him or her. You probably have to do some of your own research but not a lot. It's really a crafting of information. You have to have a good strong medical knowledge to do it.
Q: What's the time line on that?
Crowley: About 2 weeks.
Q: What kind of credentials are you looking for?
Crowley: We're probably looking at your clips, your past experience and you'll judge from that.
Q: Requires a medical background?
Crowley: I imagine your clips would have to be pretty heavily medical. Yeah. We wouldn't use somebody who has never written for a physician audience.
Q: It's not just web writing.
Q: That's not true. It doesn't apply to every market. And there are some niches you fill very effectively, if somebody needs clips, if somebody doesn't have to make a living out of it. But overall I'm just going to ask if you think this industry has a very low regard for writers. Is that a fair criticism? I just had a ridiculous experience. [The editor said,] "Oh, yeah, you're great, you're great, you're perfect, we're going to give you behind the news." Yeah, but what do you pay for it? "We're going to give you 30 cents a word."
Watson: I started discovery.com about a year and a half ago and the fees have gone up substantially because I've lobbied very heavily. Partially because it's a nascent industry. And people are still trying to figure out a shakeout.
The magazine model doesn't work because it's not a magazine. Charlene was trying to get at this.
I'm not paying a writer just to write. If that person is helping me to create an architecture of the story, if that person is helping to create side elements to the story, what is the elbow grease that that person is putting in? Then we try to negotiate something very fair. I think most of the writers that work for me feel that they're being paid very fairly. They're not being paid New Yorker rates but they're not taking New Yorker time to do their pieces.
And also, we're also on a training curve and I'm spending a lot of time with them teaching how to think and not in flatland but in a 3-dimensional way.
We're committed to writers. A majority of our site is the responsibility of freelancers and they do fabulous jobs. And we continue to lobby to raise the rates. We were discussing raising the news rates once again.
We certainly value them. I've never had a writer walk away from me because I'm not paying them enough. But I definitely hear what you're saying and will continue to work towards that.
Wingerson: I think you have to take into account that a lot of us are not profit-making sites yet.
Q: You're not making a profit but my God, somebody is.
Crowley: We're not the IPO crowd.
Wingerson: I pay different rates to different people based on the perceived difficulty of doing the piece. Our profiles are very difficult to do so we pay a dollar a word for them. And the press box is very easy, you just have to read a couple of magazine articles.
Q: 20 years ago the magazines were paying $1 a word.
Rawlings: We may break even in a year or two's time. And we don't charge.
Q: That's true but always the writers are at the bottom of the scale.
Rawlings: I wouldn't say that at all. Some of our writers get paid a lot more than I do, and they're working for advertisers too.
So if you are going to drive a bargain, if I may advise you as business people and web writers, look at the training you're going to get in exchange.
If you have an opportunity to get real training take it. People have said that to me.
Augenbraun: Depends on what you want to do. We consider ourselves a vertically integrated broadcast company, so most of our people, if they want it, have an opportunity to work on TV writing and on web writing. In television you'll make a lot more than you'll make in the web for years to come. So providing that clip to them I think really is a service. Again we're expanding so we're constantly experimenting on how we pay people and produce our people. But I do think it's a value.
And are your people different? The myth is that web readers are younger.
Watson: Not necessarily. What's so activating for me is it's interactive and engaging. It's not passive like other media can be. That's what gets me so excited going to work every day. It's a new way of thinking of an architecture of a story. How can you add different dimensions to that story?
I think there are many different styles of learning.
And if this suits somebody's style of learning it just sinks right in. They don't even know they're learning.
We're not even anywhere close to what this is going to be 5 or 10 years down the line.
Millard: One of the ways I've described the difference between web and print is that the web encourages different kinds of thought.
Steven Johnson from Feed magazine, who is one of the more thoughtful quote, digerati, unquote, talks about the hyperlink as the most important new punctuation that has been invented in the last few centuries. The link lets you go from the body of work that you're reading now to some of the information that supports it. It's as if you're reading a book and all the footnotes are accessible to you.
Now linking is an art form that hasn't been developed very thoroughly yet, and a lot of links are garbage, and a lot of links play to peoples short attention span.
But at its best a fully hypertextual article can let you drill down further to information that supports the immediate work that you're reading.
I would like to see more authors put some attention into the 3-D hypertextual aspect of their work, for one thing it would save me a lot of time because I'm the one that spends a lot of time hunting for these links. But also it would indicate a depth of research on the part of the author.
Wingerson: But don't you think it's possible to argue that web readers, and certainly web readers of the future, may be more unidimensional because it's easier to find what you're looking for?
Millard: Some of that depends on the quality of the search engines. Because if somebody's looking for information on a subject, they may find the one piece but they're not going to find the related piece.
If the engines get better people might be able to do something similar to browsing. Go beyond the first hit you get because it's almost what you need.
Look at 5 pages' worth of hits. But that browsing effect, that effect that you get when you're in the library and you look at that whole area, that three feet of shelf that tells you something you want to know and didn't think you needed to know--that hasn't appeared on the web yet. The art of reading on the web is being developed, just as the art of writing is being developed.
Q: I'd like to develop that point. Can somebody else comment on that? What are some of the advantages of working on the web, things that are particularly well-suited to the web that you didn't have in print, and what are some of the difficulties of working on the web in particular?
Augenbraun: Let me talk about another kind of site we did. We did a 1-time site for PBS, that was associated with the 1-hour documentary about the invention of the
transistor
. And we used a ton of freelancers.
Q: That was fascinating.
Augenbraun: Thank you. We were fascinated for 2 1/2 years, and close to $700,000. So this was a hugely expensive effort. But in terms of advantages for freelancers it was a great project. We actually paid by the hour because we knew it was going through so many rounds of editing. We had freelance editors and freelance writers. This was a chance to get things right. The advantage there is we created a web site--
Audience. We have a teacher's manual, we have games, it's really an interactive book, rather than an interactive magazine. It's a very different audience than what we get for our news audience.
Teachers have been writing us non-stop, it's been something they use as a textbook.
We've had teachers writing to us to say that they were changing their curriculum to work around what we did, certain little things on the site. For webzines I think its like the difference between writing a book and a magazine.
We actually have some data on the users of sciencefriday.com, about the same age as other NPR listeners, they tend to be male, they tend to be older than 40, but we do have a lot of younger kids using sciencefriday.com. What they like most are the links. A lot of our focus groups say that the urls are the most important things. When we have writers writing for us, the links are really, really important, and they have to test it and know that it's good.
Q: Is there all rights?
Q: Do we keep the rights?
Watson: You do except for Expedition, for us, you do keep your rights except for Expedition. Because we're putting the full freight on it, so it's ours. Expedition is ours. Expedition is work for hire.
Wingerson: We have a non-exclusive all rights contract. We can do what we want with it and you can do what you want with it.
Rawlings: We have all rights assigned to us. In cases where people want to use it in another way they just come to us and we have an informal agreement where people can use it. Maybe with a sharing agreement, 50-50.
It's just that we can put on the site that it's all copyright, formally.
Wingerson: We don't have a kill fee in our contract.
Rawlings: Kill fee, we've never commissioned something and not used it. Sometimes we take things off the site because there's been a complaint about an error.
Wingerson: We don't have it on the contract, but I once paid a kill fee. It wasn't his fault at all. We had to kill the story and I paid him a fee.
Millard: We have a kill fee of a third as part of our standard contract but we try never to use it. A kill fee is the worst-case scenario. Everyone wastes their time. We would rather rework a story a few times and put a little bit of elbow grease into it and get them up to speed.
This is what a lot of contracts in the future I hope will do, which is to specify print first rights and web first rights.
We started out with a contract that we borrowed from our sister publication at Columbia that were work made for hire contracts.
Within a few issues we noticed that somebody on the old Compuserve NASW bulletin board referred to it casually as "son of mutant contract hell," and we took some serious thinking about it. I spoke to Dan Carlinsky of ASJA. And we developed a new contract that, among other things, no more work made for hire. They revert and full copyright remains with our authors.
But also we discretely identify web publication as something separate and equal too. So we're weighing in to recognize the web as one more thing the publisher can do is bilk more money for an article.
[Applause]
The Tasini decision that just came down, if you get the ASJA Contract Watch, supported this, and I think it's grossly unfair to authors when a publisher retains all future web rights and doesn't provide that income stream.
Now there's no income from 21stC because we're not a commercial publication so it's sort of moot. So we did write a contract that if we ever do run into income, some aggregator, Wilson Online or something, we'll split that 50-50 with the author.
Wingerson: But let me warn you that we have been talking, investigating contract resales, and we are not pursuing it now cause the fees are so ludicrous. They want to pick this and that from out of your site. It would come to like a dollar fifty fee, because they'd give us a 3-dollar fee.
Millard: The bookkeeping costs would make it prohibitive. But there's Author's Registry. We haven't hooked up with them but we've heard they do some tracking of the micro-fees. If anybody knows more than that enlighten us.
Q: They do that.
Millard: Will they do all that bookkeeping for the little 39-cent fee?
Q: I understand it's a nascent industry and nobody's making money yet, and you are providing some training for authors to go to a new level in multi-media. But we're bringing our skills that we've honed over the years as writers, we're having to do more work for less money to accommodate the web. It's just another way of thinking about it.
Rawlings: Probably about 50-50 but more from the writers for the news, because we can't keep track of everything that's going on.
Watson: Depending on the section. News is probably 50-50. We track key journals, key conferences. For Expedition, we would love to have more fabulous ideas from the writers otherwise we have to come up with them. As you know it is more work. Everything is trying to figure out is the right combination of work that you can handle.
Crowley: Since our 'zine isn't up yet I can't say for sure, but my estimate of what it would be would be 50-50.
Stokstad: Ours is probably 90% generated in-house so we'd love to hear your ideas.
Millard: We probably generate about 2/3 to 3/4 of our own ideas. As a ballpark guess.
Augenbraun: Right now 100% in-house but 3 months from now it will be different.
List of Participants
Editorial Manager
The Alchemist
Editor in Chief
HMS Beagle
(212) 462-1915 (fax)
Senior Science Producer
Discovery Channel Online
Health Editor/Producer
MSNBC
Editorial Director
PraxisMD
<www.praxis.md>
<http://current-science-group.com/GPcos.html>
Editor
ScienceNOW
Editor
21StC
General Manager
Science & Technology News Network (stn2)
The Alchemist
Liz Rawlings
Editorial Manager
The Alchemist
Rates: $370 per 1,000 words for news or features and $170 per book review.
HMS Beagle
Lois Wingerson
Editor in Chief
HMS Beagle
(212) 462-1915 (fax)
Rates: $300 for web or book reviews, $300 for press commentaries, $500 for career stories, $1,000-1,200 for profiles of scientists or laboratories
HTML unnecessary
A question that came up on NASW online, somebody was thinking of going into an online job, and asked, should I know HTML coding:? How much should I know about the technology? I contributed one entry from my experience at Beagle, and that was, if you're a techie, and you're just fascinated by on-line journalism and computers and you love doing this stuff, by all means go ahead and learn to code.
Discovery Channel Online
Karen Watson
Senior Science Producer
Discovery Channel Online
Lori Cuthbert
Science News Editor
Rates: $200 for 350-word stories, $150 for newsbriefs
Expeditions
Beginners welcome
MSNBC
Charlene Laino
Health Editor/Producer
MSNBC
Alan Boyle, Science and Space editor
Mark Stevenson, Technology editor
Rates: $750 for 1,000 words, $1,000 or negotiable as a package with audio, etc.
Write packages
The first lesson is an easy one for those of you who are starting out. The web offers what some of you might think is a dream, an infinite newshole. But it's not that way. People don't want to read so much on the web. There's a big, big point of diminishing returns. So how do you know when to stop? In general, the reader doesn't like anything more than 2 screens. As previously mentioned, they do like to be able to print it out. And since we like to add some interactives, we're really talking 600 to 1,000 words.
Think interactive
All I can say is think multi-media, think interactive. I can't say that enough.
Rates
Our rates differ depending on whether we're a section or a subsection. So I can only tell you about the health rates.
Questions
Rats OK
Laino: Well, look around the site and see what you think we have, what we don't have.
PraxisMD
Mary Crowley
Editorial Director
PraxisMD
<www.praxis.md>
<http://current-science-group.com/GPcos.html>
(212) 366-4900 x212
Erin Michael Kelly
<Erin@praxispress.com>
Rates: $2,000 for ghostwriting physician articles, $500 for patient articles, $0.50-1.00 a word for webzine articles, $40 an hour for maintaining a links database.
Medical journal
What we've done is take a print journal called Current Practice of Medicine--the academic editor is Antonio Gotto, dean of Cornell Medicine. We have put it on line and integrated it with drug database, Pubnet, references. Every article has a series of links that are related to the article, so it should be a one-stop reference. However we weren't really happy with taking a print publication and putting it on line.
Ghostwriting
We have academic authors but we are hiring medical writers to ghost the articles for the academic authors. They'll be interviewing the authors. We will be supplying references. They will need to do some of their own research, but largely we will supply evidence-based references for the writers to use.
Webzine
We are also creating a webzine which will be the front end of the site. This doesn't exist yet. We're relaunching everything in April.
Rates
ScienceNOW
Erik Stokstad
Editor
ScienceNOW
CC to
Martin Enserink
Rates: $150-225 for 300-350 words, depending on how they're used
Research news
We do 5-6 stories a day. Most of them are research.
Rates
Payment on ScienceNOW, that stories range between 300 and 350 words, the payment for 1 item is $150. If they get picked up and put in the magazine, that adds another $50. We have a deal with britannica.com 21StC
William B. Millard
Editor
21StC
Rates: About $1 a word for 500-word media critiques, 1,000-word articles in the multi-disciplinary section, and 1,500-word think pieces.
3 departments
Wise-ass tone
Our style is essentially AP in mechanics, but we have certain house style and tone preferences.
Science & Technology News Network
Eliene Augenbraun, DO, PhD
General Manager
Science & Technology News Network (stn2)
Image
Rates: $100 a story for interns, $200 a story for experienced writers, but special projects can pay more.
Spanish
We're about to expand, we actually got a National Science Foundation grant, we're going to create a Spanish-language TV and web news service as well.
Questions
Expedition?
Q: Directed to Karen Watson. Regarding your Expedition, would you consider sending interns that need an internship as a requirement of their program?
Economic viability?
Q: All the readers of these websites don't have to pay as they would via a print version, so how are they being supported? And I don't want to seem pessimistic, but how are these things going to continue unless they're making your sponsoring organization some money? In Popular Science we have a website too, but it's a sinkhole for money. How is this going to be a viable means? Is there advertising on it, is there some other way?
Telecommunting
Q: What I find amazing is that, with all this technology, very few people take telecommuters. For example, if I said I want to work in Brooklyn and you're working in Washington, hire me. If I have to shlep to Washington once a month, fine. How do you folks feel about staff people and also telecommuters.
Move up to Science
Q: How does one get on staff in this wonderful new world that's opening up?
Clips on paper
Q: You're all wired but if one were to send you clips on paper is that permitted or will that get lost in the shuffle?
All in 300 words?
Q: And I had a question for ScienceNOW. How do you do 300-word stories that describe articles in Science and Nature?
Conflict of interest
Q: How concerned are you about hiring freelancers who are working [for a company in their field]?
Ghostwriting
Q: PraxisMD. You said you have 2 kinds of articles. One's for a physician and one's for a laymen. Now the physician's articles, are they meant to be written by physicians?
Exploitative rates?
Q: This is a kind of an editorial. I've been writing on and off 5 years, and my first experience has been covering conferences. But you just described the ghostwriting. Called to mind the experiences I've had over the last 5 years. [They say,] we want you to write really well. We want you to do a lot of work. We want you to find things that are new. And we'll pay you 30 cents a word. That seems to be the trend in web writing.
Experience
Augenbraun: It is fair to say if you're going to write for a nascent media like the web you're going to get fairly exploited. We're very conscious of this and try very hard not to exploit people. We don't have cash to pay. We just don't have it. So what we try to do is provide training instead. So we'll work with very young writers, writers with no clip files, we think we're providing value to them, by working with them, by training them. In some cases we've provided equipment to them.
Break into TV
Q: I'm really curious about this point. You say web training, do you consider that to be real training? If all you have to present is a zip disk, does that count as much as real training as if you have newspaper clips?
Web style
Q: On a quite different plane. How is your audience different from the audience that reads conventional print, and even more ethereally do you think what they're learning is different from what print readers learn? At Time magazine Harry Luce used to say the object was to get ideas off the page and into the readers' mind. Because of this new technology are people learning different things in different ways?
Contracts--all rights?
Q: I'm embarking on my writing career period--freelance, permanent, any or both--wonderful. As in other areas of writing, when you write your query letter, and hopefully when you've discussed an article that's interesting to you and the editor, and you get a go on it and you get a letter of agreement or contract that you have, as someone who's a web writer, when I come to you we talk about an article, is there some sort of contract that I have, and if you do not run my article for whatever reason, there's a hurricane, the computers go down, is there a kill fee?
Stories assigned or queried?
My question is, what percent of article ideas do you generate in-house and what percent you get from the outside?
