✍️Science Writing News Roundup #43 (May 9, 2021)

A new guide offers advice for navigating barriers to successful science communication.

What’s peer review? 5 things you should know before covering research. Is peer-reviewed research really superior? Why should journalists note in their stories whether studies have been peer-reviewed?

💎 Opportunities

• MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program will offer remote project fellowships for U.S. science journalists. These fellowships are designed to support independently conceived projects — books, investigations, documentaries — and they will be awarded for varying durations over the course of the upcoming academic year, from September 2021 to May 2022.

• Submit your entries for the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards. Winning entries will feature great storytelling that – among other strengths – is rooted in science, humanizes climate change, empowers audiences, and holds power to account.

• Call for candidates: Detroit Energy & Environment Reporting Fellow. Energy News Network, Planet Detroit, and the Detroit Equity Action Lab seek to lift up and mentor a reporter through a joint reporting fellowship. The selected journalist will receive a $3,000 per month stipend for six months to produce stories about the energy and the environment in Detroit.

Project QUEST @quest_eu

Science journalists: interested in testing a new #AI-based tool? JECT.AI is offering a unique opportunity for journalists who write about science to test JECT.AI and its #ScienceJournalism extension. Details here: docs.google.com/document/d/1_r…

📰 Articles

• Science journalists on the pandemic: ‘We couldn’t trust our regular sources’. In an event moderated by Bloomberg opinion columnist Faye Flam, leading science journalists spoke of the challenges they’ve faced covering the COVID-19 pandemic: Jason Beaubien, global health and development correspondent for NPR; Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times reporter; and Jon Cohen, staff writer with Science.

• How science journalism accelerated Süddeutsche Zeitung’s digital subscriptions. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the German newspaper has seen its digital subscriptions grow by over 60%. A major factor behind this increase is the publisher’s long-term commitment to quality science reporting.

• How collaborative journalism enabled reporting on Latin America’s threats to environmental leaders. María Paula Rubiano A., an early-career fellow at TON, tells the story behind the powerful Land of Resistants project, an ongoing international multimedia effort to document violence against environmental leaders across Latin America.

🔬 Resources

Faith Kearns @frkearns

Thank you to @JonathanLWai for reading and taking the time to write this thoughtful review of Getting to the Heart of Science Communication @ScienceMagazine. I really appreciate the engagement with the book! bit.ly/33mhRrS #HeartOfSciComm #SciComm

bit.lyA new guide offers advice for navigating barriers to successful science communication“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong,” argued Richard Feynman in 1964 (1). “It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is.” While this may indeed be true of a scientific theory, the effect

🎙️ Videos and podcasts

• The Science of Narrative with Deborah Blum, Director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.

• The Slow Rollout of Vaccines in Europe: The View from Three European Journalists

• Q&A with The New York Times Journalist Apoorva Mandavilli

reluctant vessel for information @wudanyan

📢 Happy Monday! Season three of @TWC_pod is now.... live to the public! This season is called The Business Edit. Think Marie Kondo, but for freelancing. We'll be coaching freelancers each episode, but 1st we define what coaching is. Listen: open.spotify.com/episode/1Li48P…

open.spotify.comFreelance Business Coaching 101Listen to this episode from The Writers’ Co-op on Spotify. Welcome to season three of The Writers’ Co-op: The Business Edit. Each episode of this season involves a coaching session with a freelancer just like you who struggles with issues common to freelancing like imposter syndrome, saying no, find…

📅 Events

• Introductory Storytelling Workshop, Story Collider (May 10, 2021)

• Writing on Nature with Authority, Authenticity and Personality (May 11, 2021)

• How To Make Your Freelance Business More Efficient (May 11, 2021)

• Understanding the Science of Vaccine Development: A Virtual Conversation with Dr. Robert Seder of the National Institutes of Health (May 11, 2021)

• Q&A session with Siri Carpenter (The Open Notebook), on how to build a great writer-editor relationship (May 12, 2021)

• Proactively incorporating public health knowledge into fact-checking. FactCheck.org co-founder Kathleen Hall Jamieson joins IFCN Director Baybars Örsek to discuss a new model for fact-checking that focuses on preempting falsehoods with explanatory content, as seen in a recently published article (May 12, 2021)

• Using Your Platform and Influence for Good with Author/Speaker Chris Turner (May 14, 2021)

• Covering Climate and the Environment, Science Editing Webinar Series (May 20, 2021)

• SoCal Science Writing Presents a Workshop: The Art of the Science Assay (May 20, 2021)

• Science Writers and Communicators of Canada 2021 Virtual Conference (June 7-17, 2021)

📣 Jobs and internships

• Science Writer, AbCellera, Vancouver, Canada

• C&EN Production Editor, American Chemical Society, Washington, DC

• Senior Writer (Science Journalism), Live Science, United Kingdom

• Communications Officer (home-based), The Good Food Institute Europe (GFI Europe)

• Digital communications intern, Health Care Engineering Systems Center, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL

• Data Reporter, Spectrum, New York City, NY

• Editorial Intern, Audubon, New York, NY

• Editor, MIT Open Learning-MIT Horizon, Cambridge, MA

• Communications Coordinator, Climate Generation, Minneapolis, MN

• Communications Specialist, American Astronomical Society, Washington, DC

• Assistant Editor, Discover, Waukesha, WI

• OPN Associate Editor, The Optical Society, Washington, DC

• Assistant Editor, Bay Nature Institute, Berkeley, CA

• More jobs 👉Science Writing News Roundup #42

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The Open Notebook @Open_Notebook

We are so excited to share that we have added new people to the TON masthead 🎉 But they are not new to us, as each has made important contributions to TON over the years. We’re thrilled to more officially bring them into the fold theopennotebook.com/masthead/

theopennotebook.comPeople - The Open NotebookMeet the people of The Open Notebook. Siri Carpenter, co-founder and editor-in-chief. Jeanne Erdmann, co-founder and editor-at-large.