Profiles of the latest members to join the ABSW have been posted on the Online TSR. Go here to find out who's new...
http://thesciencereporter.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-members.html
Profiles were compiled by Kat Arney, Vice chair, from information provided by members. Two that were too late to make it into the main list were:
Dr Paul Olding (BBC)
Full member
Paul is a director and producer at the BBC, with ten years of experience in making science documentaries. He has worked as producer/director on the BBC's award-winning Horizon strand, and other shows including 'Andrew Marr's Dangerous idea: Life and Death' and 'Earth - the Power of the Planet: Volcanoes'. As well as his extensive experience in the world of TV and film-making, he is a writer whose work has been published in Dive magazine, BBC Wildlife, the Guardian and the Independent. In addition, he is a freelance photographer, and has experience working as a radio presenter, including writing and presenting 'The Frog that Croaked' on BBC Radio 4. www.paulolding.co.uk
Emma Ross (Freelance communications specialist)
Associate member
Emma is an independent health communications consultant based in London. She specialises in managing media operations for medical sciences conferences, facilitating the release of other medical and public health stories and providing strategic communications advice, including media training.She spent the bulk of her career as a medical correspondent for the Associated Press before a stint as news team leader at the World Health Organisation. Emma has a Master's degree in journalism.
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
New members
Job Advert: Reporter, Research Fortnight
Research Fortnight, the main newsletter covering UK research policy, and Research Europe, which covers the European Union, is looking for a reporter to join our busy newsdesk in London.
The reporter will join a dedicated team reporting on policies that matter to researchers in the hard sciences and other academic disciplines. They will prepare stories for our daily online bulletins as well as our print newsletters.
This position calls for a background in science, engineering or the social sciences, some knowledge of research and of the UK university system, limitless curiosity and, above all, ambition to succeed in journalism. Fluency in French, German or a Scandinavian language would also be an advantage.
Research Fortnight has been published since 1994 and is the policy bible of the UK research community. Our overseas publications are valued just as highly, and reach hundreds of thousands of subscribers through our website, www.researchresearch.com
The successful applicant will be based at our offices in Hoxton, five minutes from Old Street and Liverpool Street stations, along with 30+ other staff. The starting salary is up to £21,000, subject to review after six months.
How to apply
- Please send a cover letter, CV and three examples of your work to the editor, Colin Macilwain, at job28@researchresearch.com by Tuesday, April 14.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Minimalist Web Browsing
First suggested addon to install is NoScript. This program automaticaly blocks scripts, malicious or otherwise and protects you from clickjacking and other nasties. In blocking scripts (other than those you deliberately add to the white list), it also prevents a site from running many of the standard scripts that display popup ads.
Protection aside, the second suggested Firefox addon is AdBlockPlus, which as it name would suggest block ads and more. It's an application that has the advertising industry and those who depend on it for income up in arms. However, I'd suggest that most people aware of its existence and inclined to use it are not generally the sort of people who would click ads in the first place. ABP is fairly customisable, allowing wildcard filtering of whole ad networks across all the sites you visit. it also several free subscription services of regularly updated networks that you can use to automate the filtering process. If you're using Google Chrome browser there's AdSweep and there are techniques for blocking ads in Internet Explorer 8.
If blocking ads brings on a guilty sweat, then there is often a legitimate way to get a clear view of a web article and that is through the "print version" link on a page. Not all websites offer such a link but those that do will usually present you with an ad-free view of the page you're hoping to read. If you cannot quickly see the "print version" link on the page, then you can try Print Hint, which is an add-on that creates a toolbar icon that changes colour if it detects a printer friendly page.
All self-respecting alpha browsers will already have Greasemonkey installed, but if you're still aspiring to that epithet, then you should grab this addon for Firefox. It is not in itself an application, but a framework for adding tweakable applets to Firefox that allow you to control how a web site will look in your browser. The scripts necessary to make Greasemonkey useful are available at UserScripts.org.
Among those Greasemonkey userscripts you will find tools to remove sponsored links and ads from Google and all its applications (mail, reader, calendar, talk), from Facebook, and to automatically redirect you to the print version of an article on several sites, including Scientific American, Business Week, Globe and Mail, and others.
Do I advocate you using any of these ad blocking applications? Not really, I'll leave that to your conscience, but as science writers, I don't think we're generally the target audience for ads for mass spectrometers or lab technician jobs and moreover are probably among the least likely groups (together with Linux hackers) to actually click through any ad on a site.
Indeed, I suspect that any science writer going ad free in this way will get more out of the article itself and be more likely to cite it in their own follow-up on a topic. Such a citation will not only provide Google link juice (page rank effect) from the writer's own outlet, but also put the other publication into a wider context and provide the kind of validation that advertisers can only dream about when creating their interminably flashy popunders and animated website intros.
Incidentally, you the browser should have full control over how a website looks, but you can switch these various tools on and off or set them to only block ads on specific sites. If you're feeling guilty about depriving the site owners their ad revenue, but still want to read the site "clean" you could have them switched off most of the time and just do an ad block when you need a clear view of a particular page or if you need an uncluttered printout.
Friday, 3 April 2009
Siemens backs competition for young technology journalists
Siemens, the German industry giant, is backing a competition for student journalists. The focus is on "technology journalism," a rarely acknowledged branch of the trade.
In its announcement, Competition for young journalists from northern Germany, Siemens says that the idea behind the venture is "Getting young people interested in technology through journalism".
In April, "young journalists from school newspapers and campus media from Hamburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Lower Saxony" will turn up at the Hannover Messe, the "the world's leading showcase for industrial technology". There they will report on what they see. A jury of editors and PR officials will judge the submissions.
This is the sixth such competition, with more than 500 participants over the years. Indeed, the press release says that the competition "has become a fixture of the trade fair".
Siemens says that students from all over Germany have entered the technology journalism contest and have shown that "writing about technology is not just for engineers who have a way with words".
The prizes will be awarded in June. The ten best technology journalists will be able to take part in a TV workshop while other prizes include "internships at professional journals as well as books".
Thursday, 2 April 2009
April Fools
April Fools Day has come and gone, and science, being stranger than fiction at times, once again proved a fertile ground for media pranksters.
There's a discussion going on over at the ABSW-L about good April Fools stories past and present. Our Chairman, Ted Nield, tells of a piece he did about the Geological Society honouring the then England cricket Captain Nasser Hussein, who studied geology at Durham. All good fun until a Daily Express sports reporter rang weeks later to say he'd been chasing up the story and trying to get a comment out of a "Dr Avril Foley" of the "University of Limerick"...
Mike Kenward recalls a New Scientist piece about genetically engineered beef, with an added tomato gene to make ketchup redundant. Bernard Dixon remembers another feature they ran about fragments of ancient pottery that had been unearthed showing several young ladies, and parts thereof, engaged in interesting activities.
This year it was a bit hard to tell the fact from fiction on the New Scientist website, with a report on a study of navel fluff, fuel cells for medical implants that feed on human blood and masturbation bringing hay fever relief for men (all of which may well be true. I haven't checked, though the last one comes with references. Pun intended. Sorry :p).
Elsewhere, the Express did a piece on an invisible car, the Telegraph reported that fish could be the solution to our energy crisis, and the Guardian said it was going to publish only on Twitter (a good satire but rather poor as an April Fools prank). And over on Radio 4, the Today programme also had an item on spider monkeys bringing donuts in tribute to an island-bound alpha chimpanzee female, with scientists debating whether primates should now be reclassified as the same species as humans.
What's the best science/technology/medicine-related April Fools you've heard?
Do bloggers need editors?
The debate about the merits of bloggers versus "professional" science writers rattles on. You can read a lot of it in a recent post on something called A Blog Around The Clock, within Seed's ScienceBlogs empire. The piece in question, Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle, comes from someone who clearly thinks he has a lot to contribute to the debate. And it really is a lot.
This raises an issue that does not seem to enter into the ruminations of the bloggers. They rattle on about accuracy, timeliness and stuff, but rarely get into things like the choice of a story and practical things like readability and length.
My software tells me that this piece is more than 10,000 words long. That may be a inaccurate, life is too short to read the piece carefully, let alone to count the words.
Which publication would allow a writer to rabbit on at that length? Even in its most ponderous days Scientific American would have seen that as at the upper limit of readability. And on New Scientist, another place where they cover science at greater length than most newspapers, it would have been a crime against humanity.
It is just too easy to write too much when you don't have an editor shouting at you. That is one reason why it is harder to write science for tabloid newspapers than for broadsheets. The editors are less tolerant on the tabloids.
Written by a specialist in "chronobiology (circadian rhythms and photoperiodism), with additional interests in comparative physiology, animal behavior and evolution," this particular item may contain some gems. (The readers who commented seem to think so, but they fall into the usual mould for blogdom "Great post, awesome" sums up the insight available in most responses.) Few readers, though, will have the staying power to mine them all.
An editor would have told our expert to focus on one or two points and to make them clearly and concisely. The editor would also have asked who the audience might be.
Unlike bloggers, profesional writers see little point in writing for their own consumption. Ideally, they want to reach people who would normally avoid the subject. You don't do that by writing too much.
A paradox here is that the web is supposed to be a very different medium: writers have to "screen at a time" reading. This guy witters on for screen after screen.
Maybe there is a point to Twitter after all.
