I recently photographed a banana slug for a short article I was writing about banana slug slime for the Santa Cruz Hilltromper, a website for nature lovers in the area. “Okay, now turn your head to the left… down a little… actually can you crawl up this rock a bit more for me? I’d really…
I stood with my feet buried in sand, staring at the ocean waves as they touched the beach. It was mid-October. To my untrained eye, the Monterey Bay shoreline looked like a child’s bubble bath. To California Fish and Wildlife scientists, it was a terrible déjà vu. Nine years ago, an algal bloom wreaked havoc—and…
In 2000, my husband’s cat made the news. The Cerro Grande Fire had chased his family from their home in Los Alamos, New Mexico but everything happened so fast that they didn’t have time to find their cat. When the cat ambled into the house a few hours later, firefighters caught him and stuffed him…
The story of the world’s first Ebola epidemic burns at the flash point between science and policy, an enticing yet frightening intersection that can make or break a writer’s credibility. During an after-dinner speech at the time when the outbreak is beginning to dominate the news, I grasp the value of health care policy and…
Following the recent sexual harassment scandal at Scientific American, heated ethical debates dominated the science journalism digisphere. We —the ten budding writers in the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program class of 2014, led by our instructor, Nature reporter Erika Check Hayden — decided to weigh in. We started with the nine Principles of Journalism…
As many of you know, I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. #ilovewaffles (1/2) Some days, I’m tempted to relinquish my membership for reasons that will remain mysterious, (2/2) and other days, I eagerly watch my Twitter feed as if it were the latest episode of “Glee.” #gleek! But until the #AAASmtg, I didn’t regularly…
Where there are science writers, there’s schmoozing. And parties during the AAAS meeting last week elevated the evening social gathering to a new standard of sophistication. One event, at the Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., featured fancy finger food and cocktails in test tubes. At another, waiters served bison sausage with jelly. But my favorite…
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is notoriously good at finding means for justifying its science budget, sometimes deploying what amounts to science fiction (see vintage hype image gallery in a separate post). Mostly, though, it’s simple hype. All of us slugs are on the NASA news release list. An unusually cryptic, tantalizing PR…
A new website called The Open Notebook just launched focusing on the craft of science journalism, and I think it’s well worth checking out. The website features interviews with science writers about recent stories they’ve published. It seems like a great way to get insights about how they tackled the story, including the nitty-gritty details:…
The Story By William Blake-Drake Story! Story! yet to write In the newsrooms of the night, What nocturnal journalist Could frame thy lede and nutgraf/gist? In what distant source or two Burn the quotes I need for you? On what site dare facts reside? What the Google, at my side? And what structure, and what…
