Category: Sci.Journalism

“I’m really interesting in writing about science and I was wondering how you got into it and whether you had any tips?”
At some point in our careers, all science writers receive an email like this and most of us probably sent one when we started out.

The Cape Town Book Fair – the largest on the African continent – had science journalism in the spotlight during its fifth season July 30-August 2. The gathering featured South African and other African reporters who have taken on the fraudsters and scam artists preying on the hopes of uneducated people across the continent with phony medicine and science.

Pouria Nazemi is an amateur astronomer in Tehran, and he’s been at it for 16 years. He’s also science editor for Jam-e-Jam, Tehran’s largest newspaper, and he’s agreed to translate the World Federation of Science Journalism’s online reporting course from English into Farsi, the language of Iran.

Take one of the most persistent mathematical mysteries in the world, one that underlies secrecy in everything from national spy agencies to shopping on the Internet, and figure out how to make sense of it visually for television.

The Turkish-language version of the WFSJ online journalism course has landed on our website, and a former radio news director in Turkey thinks it’s not a moment too soon.

Only if they attend ABSW’s July conference - Science reporters worldwide grapple with the complexities of molecular biology – the DNA watershed and all that has followed since. But reporters and editors in the U.K. will have an opportunity in July to get up close and personal with the knowledge available from genomics, the new “consumer” service that has emerged from DNA sequencing

‘In rude health’ but ‘under threat’. This is the state of science journalism in Britain, according to the January 2010 report ‘Science and the Media: Securing the Future’.

At the beginning of March 2010, Nature launched its third dedicated portal: Nature Middle East. The two previous portals are Nature China, launched in 2007, and Nature India launched in 2008.

By Nicolás Luco, El Mercurio  -  Like never before, after an earthquake, top editors fall upon science journalists to try to explain the disaster. We rush to our seismology connections. We raise questions in Facebook to see if new ideas come in. Mail our international contacts studying Chile's crust: mainly in France.

Science journalists often have much difficulty getting African scientists accept to be interviewed. Ruth Wanjala, reports from Nairobi (Kenya) how science cafés might be part of the solution and create good opportunities for science journalists.

 Sarka Spevakova, who attended the 11th Annual Global Development Conference in Prague, last week, explains why science journalists should look at the economics angle of a story.

“Scientists can bypass people like me and the media to reach the public directly.”
Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief, Nature

On the campus of the University of Ottawa in Canada’s capital, about 25 science students recently crowded into a seminar room bringing news releases they had written about their research. They were met by longtime science reporters from the Toronto Star and the Ottawa Citizen, and four senior, general assignment journalists – reporters who often cover science willy-nilly. 

This is a story about money, and how to help freelancers when they are ignored, cheated or stalled when it’s payday. The National Association of Science Writers in the United States has a “grievance committee,” that has successfully taken up their cause. Here’s how it works.

Early in July Ashfaq Yusufzai looked down at his new “shiny and beautiful” Gold Medal from Pakistan’s Ministry of Health and UNICEF then spoke to about 100 medical and science reporters in a high-end Islamabad hotel conference room.

An editorial in the latest issue of Science provides a balanced perspective on the challenges facing science journalism in the industrialized world, and the opportunities for its expansion in the developing world.

Here’s the deal for a student of science journalism who knows she’s going to be looking for work soon. She’s been writing stories for her profs for two or three years. She’s onto the game. She’s doing well. But when she goes knocking on the doors of potential employers, they want to see work that’s been published or broadcast or been online.

Since 7^th January 2009, China has a new magazine, Science News Bi-weekly, aimed at reviewing the science funding and policy scene for the benefits of its growing national community of scientists and researchers.

There’s a new voice in science reporting coming out of Kenya but taking all of Africa for its beat. Up and running only since June 2008, Science Africa, is a work of a Nairobi editorial team under the direction of Otula Owuor, who started working on it as he was winding down his part in a WFSJ mentoring project. The mentoring had a strong part in his inspiration.

The worldwide status of science journalism is a mixture of good and bad news. While a recent Nature article focuses on the decline of science journalism in Europe and North America, science journalism is making headways in Africa, in the Arab World, in Asia and in Latin America.

In a world of shrinking newsrooms and newsroom budgets, science is often covered by political reporters, lifestyle reporters, or general assignment news and feature writers.The results are sometimes good, but often not pretty at all.

The last journalist to join the Amundsen research icebreaker expedition in the Canadian Arctic in the summer of 2008 has been blanketing the Arab world with climate change coverage ever since her return home to Lebanon.

A Lisbon reporter has joined forces with a physicist to train Portuguese-speaking science journalists in Africa and East Timor. The pair is building their program with help from journalists in their own homeland, others from Brazil, and with tips from WFSJ’s mentoring projects.

Science Journalism staff jobs are being lost in the developed world, but are increasing in the developing world. This contrasting situation is reported by Cristine Russell, President of the United States Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, in an article published on the online Columbia Journalism Review "The Observatory", February 17

CNN take note. In December the most powerful cable news channel in the world laid off its entire science and technology reporting team, saying it wanted to cut costs and increase staff efficiency. In sharp contrast, December also saw a retrospective page in a Guatemalan newspaper capping six months of biweekly full-page science features – and with promise of many more to come.

… and then back to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, to the French embassy there for a transit visa. Our traveller, Christophe Mvondo, works for La Nouvelle Expression in Yaoundé, Cameroon. One of eight reporters sponsored by WFSJ, he was headed to the EcoHealth Forum in Merida Mexico.

Tatiana Pichugina, science editor of the monthly magazine Vokrug Sveta, was aboard the icebreaker Amundsen last June on its research mission near Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic. A month later, her attitudes about climate...

There’s a new science magazine waiting in the wings of world’s largest democracy, which has become a hotbed of 21st-century science.

We are writing on behalf of several national and international science journalism organizations to express our strong concern about CNN's shortsighted decision to cut its science, technology and environment unit in one fell swoop. In wielding this ax, your network has lost an experienced and highly regarded group of science journalists at a time when science coverage could not be more important in our national and international discourse.

More than 30 writers and editors from 16 Arab countries converged on Fez, Morocco, 25 October 2008, for the first-ever conference of the Arab Science Journalists Association.

By Julie Clayton - Journalists often complain that scientists don’t wish to talk to them, but researchers in Uganda are planning to make such grievances a thing of the past with a new training program that tries to break down communication barriers between journalists and scientists. The program lies at the forefront of new moves by several scientific institutions in Africa to cultivate the media’s interest in science.

The U.S. National Association of Science Writers (NASW) has made its annual Science in Society awards multimedia. Print and electronic productions will be competing in the same categories.

Science journalists worldwide could be forgiven their envy as they watch photocopy funds flow to their colleagues’ associations in the United States and Finland. In 2008, for the first time, thanks to an additional $100,000 from the photocopy fund, the U.S. based National Association of Science Writers (NASW) has created travel grants for science writers to attend conferences and do other reporting that requires expensive travel.

In August as the world turned its attention to the Beijing Olympics, Zhou Xinyu, the science editor of China Youth Daily’s popular supplement Bingdian Weekly, found herself suddenly very relaxed among busy colleagues.

When newspaper reporter Lucy Calderón stepped in front of a class of 14 students at Istmo University in Guatemala City very early on a morning in September, she was making history. This small room bright with sunlight pouring in from four windows and a garden in the back was host to the first university instruction in science reporting that had ever happened in her country.

A survey of 1354 scientists in France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States puts to rest the widespread belief that scientists despise and perceive negatively the work of science journalists. The authors of the study conclude: "interactions between scientists and journalists are more frequent and smooth than previously thought".

Mentees in the prime project of the World Federation of Science Journalists, The Science Journalism Coorperative (SjCOOP) continued to impact on the landscape of science journalism with a new network and website tool dedicated to journalists and scientists in the Greater Horn of Africa and the rest of the continent.

While it is mainly doom and gloom in the US and Europe, newspapers are increasing their circulation and revenues in many developing countries.

The United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) - a major donor to WFSJ's flagship project SjCOOP - intends to support research on the role media plays in transforming research into policy in developing countries.

Lanky veteran science reporter Otula Owuor of Nairobi, Kenya is on his way to the beautiful Ugandan town of Entebbe, on the shores of the largest tropical lake in the world, Lake Victoria. Entebbe's got the green acres of the 110-year-old national botanical gardens, the orphaned chimpanzees and rhinos of the national zoo and near the shoreline, not far from the yachts and hotels, a jumble of white buildings which is the Uganda Virus Research Institute.

Watch on You Tube a debate on science journalism in the Arab World, held in Doha (Qatar) on Tuesday 5 February 2008.

Panellists included science journalists from Egypt, Africa and Europe who were joined by an Arab scientist and the Editor in Chief of Aljazeera Network. The TV Panel was put together by Nadia El-Awady from Islamonline and held at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar in collaboration with Aljazeera Network. Shereen El Feki, of Aljazeera International moderated.

Chinese science communicators launched the China Science Reporting Network (CSRN) on 16 November 2007

Pallab Ghosh, President of the World Federation of Science Journalists, reports from Kyoto that science journalists are making progress in being recognized on the international stage.

Science journalists and their associations have until 23 September to participate in shaping how the United Kingdom will spend £650 million on research for development in Africa and Asia, between 2008 and 2013

WFSJ, in collaboration with UNESCO, invites science journalists, particularly colleagues working in the developing world, to comment on a generic science journalism curriculum.

Ochieng' Ogodo
18 April 2007
Source: SciDev.Net
[MELBOURNE] Science journalists have a duty to investigate and report scientific fraud, according to retired research scientist Phil Vardy, formerly of Macquarie University, Australia.

Paula Leighton
17 April 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

Kimani Chege
20 April 2007
Source: SciDev.Net
[MELBOURNE] Government interference is impeding reportage of public-funded research in developing and emerging countries, say journalists.

Hepeng Jia
18 April 2007
Source: SciDev.Net
[MELBOURNE] Science journalists need a code of ethics if they are to communicate increasingly complicated science accurately, delegates at the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists were told yesterday (17 April).

(source: ISWA)
In on-line editorial written in recognition of World Tuberculosis Day (March 24), SciDev.Net's director David Dickson noted the frightening re-emergence of TB in both the developed and developing world, with the over a million people dying of the disease every year in the latter.

News from all over the world

An overview of news from all over the world of interest to science journalists and science communicators. Produced by the International Science Writers' Association (ISWA): www.internationalsciencewriters.org