Single Best: Laura Helmuth

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on March 5th, 2013

Today we continue our new series, Single Best. We asked top journalists and editors to give us their single best piece of advice — given or taken, their single best idea, reporting trip or memorable experience. Here, Laura Helmuth shares a bit of wisdom she learned from Molly Ivins.

Helmuth is the science and health editor at Slate and a member of the National Association of Science Writers executive board, and is also a member of the TON advisory board.
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Laura Helmuth’s Single Best from The Open Notebook on Vimeo.

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Videography by Evan Howell and made possible with a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

George Johnson chases lightning

Posted by Siri Carpenter on February 26th, 2013

George Johnson

Some people fret over the chances that lightning might strike the same place twice. After three summers trailing lightning-chaser Tim Samaras on a unique photographic quest, science writer George Johnson would perhaps have been content with it happening just once. On assignment for National Geographic, Johnson patiently waited and watched as Samaras tried to capture a long-sought image. It was not to be, and that posed a conundrum: How to write about an unfinished quest and still leave your reader — and editor — satisfied? [Chasing Lightning appeared in National Geographic in August 2012.]

Here, Johnson tells TON co-executive editor Siri Carpenter the story behind the story:

How did you come to this story?

It was the summer of 2009, and National Geographic asked if I was interested in doing this story about Tim Samaras and his hunt to get this shot of a lightning bolt the moment the ground leader and the dart leader connect. This moment had never been recorded. His Holy Grail was to get this shot with this incredibly amazing Rube Goldberg-ish kind of camera — the Kahuna. They had already started with a different writer, and for some reason that didn’t work out. I said, “Sure.”

How important was it that you be there when and if he got the shot?

The original idea is that I would go out with him for a few days [on a few occasions ] — a week or two total — while he was chasing lightning storms across northeastern New Mexico and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and into Arizona and Colorado. I would follow him around; watch what he was doing; write about that, and, of course, if I was really lucky, he would get the shot that summer. If I was really, really, really lucky, I would be there when he got the shot, in which case I suspect [the story] would have been on the cover. The first summer we did this, he didn’t get the shot. My editor said, “We realized this was a long shot, both that he will succeed, and an even longer shot that you’ll be there when he does. But in any case it makes a great story, and the story is the quest.” So I wrote up the story of the quest and gave it to them in the fall of 2009. Read more »

Ed Yong profiles a scientific dynasty

Posted by Carl Zimmer on February 19th, 2013

Science is practiced by people, and people never work in isolation. Scientists train their students, who grow up to be scientists in their own right and train students to follow in their own footsteps. Along the way, scientific dynasties emerge, working together to establish new ways of thinking and applying their ideas to new problems. This sociological fact of science gets lost in most journalism, which typically focuses on single pieces of new research.

Ed Yong decided to rectify this wrong with a piece called “Dynasty,” which appeared in the January 17, 2013 issue of Nature. In his article, Yong profiles Robert Paine, an ecologist who in the 1960s changed the way we think about the natural world — and who also trained some of the most influential ecologists of later generations.

Here, Yong talks to TON guest contributor Carl Zimmer about the challenge of the task:

Zimmer: How exactly did you get the idea? Doing an article about a dynasty is unusual as science writing goes. Was this your idea from the start, or did it suddenly morph from something else?

Yong: It was definitely the idea first of doing a dynasty story and looking at the ways scientists influence each other over generations. The idea came from reading a piece by John McPhee. It was a piece of autobiography and talked about some of the stories that he’d written, and one of them was a set of profiles that were all linked by this central character. I read this and thought maybe I could do something similar for science, because science has these chains of academic influence. I thought it might be quite interesting to study that aspect of science, which is so important to the endeavor, but which, as you say, no one ever talks about very much.

I pitched it to Helen Pearson at Nature without really any idea about which dynasty I would look at or who this person would be. It would just be about a chain of scientists. I would definitely recommend not pitching a story for which you have no story idea.

But this one seemed to work. Helen had had the same idea herself, and so we had converged on the same concept. Then it became a matter of finding someone to write about. She came up with the idea of writing about Paul Nurse, because he was very influential. He basically kick-started the use of Saccharomyces pombe [fission yeast] as a model organism. And I thought maybe doing the people who worked on telomeres. They’re quite a rich dynasty and have a couple Nobel Prizes. But both of those families have been written about a lot.

I wanted someone who had a big influence in science, who had an important dynasty, who had interesting stories, but was still alive so I could still interview them, but who hadn’t been written about loads and loads of times before. So that was relatively difficult.

I went to Science Online in 2012 and I was chatting with a few people about this, and Nancy Baron, who runs COMPASS, said, “Hey you could write something about Bob Paine.” I had never heard of him.

Nancy told me about his work and said, “This is the guy who came up with keystone species” — that is, species that are disproportionately influential in its environment. So I pitched that idea to Helen and she liked it. And that was when we finally had a story and not a nebulous concept. Read more »

Maryn McKenna reports the dark side of agriculture

Posted by Jeanne Erdmann on February 12th, 2013

Maryn McKenna

Science journalist Maryn McKenna has covered the infectious diseases beat for more than a decade. During that time, she’s written countless articles and two award-winning books on the subject. Through her reporting, she developed an interest in how large-scale farming operations spread antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Last year, McKenna produced a package of stories on women who had contracted antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections from chickens carrying resistant E. coli. She created the project in collaboration with the Food and Environmental Reporting Network (FERN) — an independent, non-profit news organization that produces investigative journalism on food, agriculture, and environmental health. The stories landed on a single day last July in The Atlantic, ABC News, and Good Morning America, and on McKenna’s Wired blog, Superbug.

Here, McKenna tells TON co-executive editor Jeanne Erdmann the story behind the story:

You mentioned during an interview with NPR that you first learned about the potential human health risks posed by large-scale agriculture back in in 2006. What tipped your interest in this problem?

A couple of things happened. First, when I started reporting the book Superbug in 2006 (the book came out in 2010), I learned that in 2004 scientists had noticed a new type of the resistant bug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which had previously been a hospital and community problem but now was arising in animals and moving to humans, and was detectable because of a resistance signature from a particular antibiotic. So that got me interested in the topic.

I signed a contract for Superbug in early 2007, and I wanted to bring attention to the book both before and after publication, and to attach my name to the topic. So I started a blog, which was also called Superbug, and which is now at Wired.com. In starting the blog, I assigned myself the task of constantly surveying the scientific literature and news from around the world, to see what was surfacing about antibiotic resistance, and then pushing what I discovered out to an audience who might not have time to survey that landscape. In return, I wanted readers to help crowdsource my research, by talking to me about what they knew about antibiotic resistance. In the process of doing that, I started finding papers about the impact of antibiotic use in agriculture, and whether that was causing resistant organisms to cross to humans.

Then, after the book came out in paperback in 2011, I realized I wanted to talk more about the topic. I felt I had a lot to say about the control of antibiotic resistance in hospitals and the community, but the agricultural side felt under-investigated. I decided to make myself into a food policy reporter, by exploring and covering the topic more. On blogs, the only gauge of whether you are having an impact is your audience’s reaction. So I started trying to write about the intersection of antibiotic use and livestock-raising, and the potential impact on human health, and discovered lots of people are interested in this. Read more »

Single Best: Deborah Blum

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on February 5th, 2013

Today at The Open Notebook, we introduce a new recurring feature, Single Best. We asked top science writers to give us their best advice in one minute or less.

We begin with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum. Blum is the author of five books, most recently the best-seller, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Blum is a science blogger for Wired and is currently working on a book about poisonous food.

Deborah Blum’s Single Best from The Open Notebook on Vimeo.

Videography by Evan Howell and made possible with a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

David Quammen on turning research into story, part II

Posted by David Dobbs on January 29th, 2013

Last week, we published the transcript of a discussion between David Dobbs and David Quammen that we sponsored at last year’s National Association of Science Writers meeting. Today, we present Part II of the conversation between the two Davids. Most of this interview took place by phone in early December.

David Dobbs: Where do you write?

David Quammen: I’ve got a lovely office in the back of our house that is lined almost totally with books. It has a Pullman compartment sleeper in it, a little box bed behind a curtain, that I can sleep in in a pinch.

I got that idea because I was once in Faulkner’s house while a researcher on a CBS documentary, and he had a nook with a bed. And on those walls he outlined a book, The Fable. I was struck by how sensible it was to have a bed in your office. I don’t nap in it. I take naps on the floor. But sometimes I come in the middle of the night and sleep, then get up. There are periods of time, when I was single, when I slept in this little nook and lived in my office. It’s like a fire escape — you don’t need it much, but it’s good to know it’s there.

Office is about seven paces by five. Maybe 15 by 20 feet. Books, file cabinets, notebook and journals. Bulletin boards. On those I often have a map, to refresh my memory about where things are. Right now I have a map of the Congo Basin. That’s from Spillover.

How do you set about writing a book like Spillover? You said in our earlier conversation you have these notebooks and ledgers from your fieldwork, for instance. To sum that up — you take these field notes in reporters’ notebooks in the field; you summarize those and turn them into rough narrative form in a ledger notebook each night or the next morning; and three years later you’ve finally finished all this work. You pile all this on your desk along with other stuff and you’re ready to go. What next?

Yes: I’ve got these field notes and the journals, which are written out. Piles of books, journal articles. I do not make outlines. I have a general sense of what I want to cover. I make a cryptic little diagram of what I want to cover and how I want to get from point A to point F or B. It might look like a board game, with arrows winding around — visit Oz, go through the forest, and on to Oz. Or it might be just a list of things. But in some cases I don’t even have that.

For Spillover, I wrote a 30-page proposal where I pretended to know what I was going to cover. I could look at that occasionally. And here’s the most crucial thing: I assembled a list of chapter titles — major sections. I look for those titles. Interesting titles that will cover the larger ideas and places and particular diseases I want to cover. I start looking for those titles during the search process. Some come easily, and some I have to struggle with for a while. Read more »

Video: David Quammen interview

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on January 25th, 2013

On Tuesday, we posted an edited transcript of an interview that TON contributor and editorial board member David Dobbs conducted with author David Quammen. This conversation took place before a live audience at a TON event at the National Association of Science Writers meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina last October.

Below is a video of the conversation in its entirety.

This videotaping was made possible by a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

David Quammen on turning research into story, part I

Posted by David Dobbs on January 22nd, 2013

David Quammen has been one of the world’s leading science writers for over a quarter century, with eight acclaimed nonfiction books, including the iconic The Song of the Dodo, as well as four novels. His new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, gave us the excuse to interview him for TON — twice.

Below you’ll find an edited text version of the first of two conversations that Quammen had late last year with TON contributor and advisory board member David Dobbs. The first interview was conducted in October before a standing room only TON event at the National Association of Science Writers meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina; the second was conducted by phone a few weeks later.

Part I of this interview focuses on the logistics of reporting and interviewing, with some attention at the end to meta-concerns about mysteries versus epiphanies. Part II, which we’ll publish next Tuesday, is drawn mainly from the December phone interview and will focus on how Quammen, once finished with reporting and laden with notes, transcripts, ideas, and memories, actually sits down and writes a book such as The Song of the Dodo or Spillover. Our text versions of these interviews were edited by Dobbs from much longer transcripts. On Friday, we will post a video of the TON event in its entirety.

Read more »

Are you an editor or a writer? Part II: The editors.

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on January 16th, 2013

Writers and editors work together all the time, but the two clans are somewhat mysterious to one another. Mutually suspicious, even. How do you know which career path you should specialize in? And how do editors become editors, anyway? Ann Finkbeiner and Laura Helmuth asked several journalists to describe the differences between writers and editors. In an earlier post, writers explained what it is they do. Today, the editors weigh in. Read more »

Are you a writer or an editor? Part I: The writers.

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on January 15th, 2013

Are you an editor or a writer? How do you know? What are the crucial differences between the two specializations? The question arose when Slate science editor Laura Helmuth was visiting a class that Ann Finkbeiner teaches at the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Ann, hoping to help her students figure out whether they were natively editors or natively writers, asked Laura about the difference between writers and editors.

Laura punted.

Ann didn’t know, either.

After the class was over, Ann and Laura gave the question some more thought and then enlisted other writers and editors to help them answer it. We’ll run their answers in two separate posts today and tomorrow. Today, the writers. Read more »

Happy New Year and Some News

Posted by Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann on January 14th, 2013

As we welcome 2013, we have some exciting changes in the works at TON.

We’re pleased to announce that Christie Aschwanden has joined TON as managing editor. Christie will be commissioning and scheduling stories and making sure that our publication schedule stays on track. Please send your suggestions, questions for Ask TON and story pitches to her at christie@theopennotebook.com.

We’ll post new content every Tuesday, beginning tomorrow. Some weeks we may post more often than that, but you can expect a new post every Tuesday from this week forward. Our new production schedule begins with a two part feature by Laura Helmuth and Ann Finkbeiner. Stay tuned!

*Photo by Shutterstock.

Cynthia Graber profiles a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein

Posted by Melanie Bauer on December 21st, 2012

Cynthia Graber

While Cynthia Graber isn’t new to reporting on regenerative medicine, her interview with Tufts University biologist Michael Levin led to some unexpected stories. In research that recalls the toils of Dr. Frankenstein, Levin uses electricity to initiate regeneration of body parts in living organisms. In light of recent advances in DNA research, the field of bioelectricity has been largely abandoned. However, this hasn’t stopped Levin from incorporating his childhood passion for science into a lifelong pursuit of human regeneration. [Electric Shock, Graber's profile of Levin, appeared in Matter on December 18, 2012.]

Here, Graber tells TON guest contributor Melanie Bauer the story behind her story:

First off, what lead you to interview Michael Levin? And why did you decide to write a profile on Levin rather than a traditional feature?

I wrote a story three years ago for the Boston Globe Magazine about regenerative medicine in Boston. While doing that research I met a source, who is very well known in the field, who pointed me to Michael Levin at Tufts. As soon as I met with him I thought, “Wow, this is worth more than the two paragraphs that were going to end up in my story.”

I followed his work over the years and decided I needed to cover this, so I talked to different editors but they were skeptical. Levin had been covered here and there in short pieces, but I thought that a lot of the strings of his research weren’t getting pulled together along with the significance of it.

What was your goal with telling Levin’s story?

What made Levin’s story interesting as a narrative are two things: First, the thread of the science goes back to the 1700s, to the science that inspired the story of Frankenstein, which looms so large in our cultural history; and also that this line of research had mostly dropped off the map after the 1950s. But there was some really key research done in this field in the ’70s and ‘80s.

This type of research in bioelectricity is only now starting to gain more attention, and I found it very interesting. I like stories that are a little contrarian, and this story is a bit contrarian and says that there is a whole other line of research that had been forgotten that seems to be incredibly important. In this field of bioelectricity I’ve spoken to nearly, but not quite, everyone in the field to make sure Levin’s research is as key as I thought it was. They all say that he has taken it to an entirely new level; he’s doing really exciting things that nobody else would have thought to do or has been able to do until now. So it just reaffirmed to me that this was an important story, and the story of who he is is tied to that.

Why did you choose Matter as the outlet for this story?

In late 2011, early 2012, I started talking to some editors and I realized I had to just write the story. I had been talking to editors at Wired and a couple other places, but when I wrote the story, I convinced Levin to work with me on it even though I didn’t have a definite publisher. I spent much of the spring working on it, in addition to doing what I was doing to earn a living, and in the end I had 9,000 words. I wrote a story and it was very long. Then I was talking to a friend of mine who said there was a new long-form online science magazine called Matter, and she told me they were also taking freelance. So it just seemed like the obvious place to go. It was long and complicated but still narrative, and about basic research, and told a story, so this seemed like the right place, and I got in touch with them.

The way Matter works is that all their stories are at least 5,000 words. I will be their second story, but their first story was longer than 5,000 words as well. The benefit of e-publishing is that you’re not necessarily limited by words, but by the story.

What was your process for interviewing? The article is set up chronologically, from childhood to adulthood. Is this how the story unraveled as told by Levin, or did you piece it together post-hoc?

I actually started with questions about his childhood. I wanted to loosen him up a little bit, so the first thing I asked him was, “Tell me how you first got interested in this topic [bioelectricity].” He started telling me a story that I could tell was what he told everyone. There’s actually only one piece I’ve read about him that was a profile—that had been written in the Tufts magazine—and this was the same story he had told the Tufts magazine reporter. Obviously, I didn’t want the same story he’d told them. I knew there had to be more than that. So after questioning and questioning, I got some of those personal details about his childhood. It made me think, “Wow, this is even more interesting than I thought.”