✍️Science Writing News Roundup #159

Reporting on extreme heat and health + How to cover planetary boundaries.

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🗺️Resources

• CASW debuts Connector, a resource library for science journalism and communication. Connector helps both aspiring and practicing science writers find organizations and institutions that provide a broad range of crucial resources.

• Reporting on extreme heat and health: This guide to reporting on heatwaves provides tips to help members of the press cover heat stories in a way that accurately represents the risks people face.

• Five key questions for business journalists navigating sustainability coverage. Business and financial journalists now find themselves increasingly covering climate change-related topics as a warming globe threatens to disrupt the stability and prosperity of many companies and industries.

• How to report on healthcare for trans youth accurately and sensitively. Media coverage of healthcare for trans minors too often perpetuates stigma, fuels controversy, and misinforms the public. Journalists can counteract this pattern and report on this topic responsibly by following many of the fundamentals of good journalism and including the experiences of the people seeking the treatments you’re writing about.

📰Opportunities

• Apply to speak at the Science Journalism Forum 2023. In this year’s edition, the forum aims to explore the theme of “Science Journalism: Seeking Best Practices”.

• Less than one week left to submit your entry for the 2023 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards contest! Since their inception in 1945, the AAAS Science Journalism Awards have honored professional journalists for distinguished reporting on the sciences, engineering, and mathematics.

• Calls for pitches to write about science and technology, biotechnology, biopharma, climate change, policy and society and more + Fellowships for science writers 👉Bonus content for monthly supporters.

📌Articles

• Journalists should help audiences understand extreme weather – even when they lack climate data. Even if attribution studies don’t exist, we can still show links between climate change and extreme weather, argues María Mónica Monsalve.

• Wildfires have long-term health effects, both direct and indirect, several studies show. A recent systematic review of studies on long-term impacts of wildfires finds they are associated with mental health disorders, COVID-19 complications, death from heart disease, shorter height in children and poorer overall health.

• The federal government aims to crack down on PFAS in drinking water. What happens next?

• ‘Medical errors are the third leading cause of death’ and other statistics you should question.

🎧Videos and Podcasts

• How to Cover Planetary Boundaries | Mongabay Webinars

• Webinar: Breaking into narrative journalism

• The State of Climate Mis/Disinformation in East Africa

• Local Journalists Webinar: Reporting on Fentanyl and the Opioid Crisis

• The Jackson water crisis through a student journalist's eyes

• Let's Talk SciComm: Interview with science journalist Belinda Smith

📻News

• Q&A: How this Stanford freshman brought down the president of the university. Theo Baker, a student journalist at Stanford, was honored with a prestigious George Polk Award for investigating claims that the university’s president published research papers that contained manipulated data.

• Sara Shipley Hiles grows science writing programs at Missouri School of Journalism. Sara Shipley Hiles has been telling the stories behind the world’s environmental challenges since the beginning of her career. Now, as an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she is supporting those stories on a larger scale than ever before.

• Science Journalism and Social Justice and Building Global Networks for a Stronger Profession will be focus themes of the WCSJ2025 and WCSJ2027.

🧯Events

• Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation (Columbia Journalism School, New York, NY; September 21-22, 2023)

• More events 👉Bonus content for monthly supporters.

📚Jobs

• 👉Bonus content for monthly supporters.

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