A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life of Ferris Jabr

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York, Foreign Policy, Wired, Outside, Slate, Pacific Standard, Hakai Magazine, Modern Farmer, Aeon, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Currently, he is writing a book about the coevolution of Earth and life, which will be published by Random House. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

TON Editors

Reported Features

The Pitch as Hypothesis: How Stories Evolve through Reporting

Pedro Márquez-Zacarías

News & Announcements

Welcome to The Open Notebook‘s First Intern, Sarah Luft

TON Editors

Reported Features

Roundtable: Keeping Pace with Pandemic Coverage in the U.S.

Katherine J. Wu

Reported Features

Reporting on Retractions

Pratik Pawar

Reported Features

Hold the Line: Reporting without Phone or Internet Access

Aishwarya Jagani

Interviews

Juli Berwald’s Life on the Rocks Meditates on Coral Reefs, Motherhood, and Battling the Unknown

Celia Ford

Reported Features

Getting Personal: When and How to Write Yourself into Your Story

Adela Wu

Reported Features

Making Your Science Writing Sing: Craft Lessons from Poetry

Bradley Allf

Where to Get Started at The Open Notebook

We’ve published more than 500 articles on the craft of science journalism, and we also offer courses and other training opportunities, Spanish translations, DEI resources, a huge database of successful pitch letters, tip sheets, and more. Here are some starting points for digging in.

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Learning Opportunities

SCIENCE JOURNALISM

Master Classes

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Mentoring

Programs

Learn about The Open Notebook‘s mentoring programs, including our longstanding early-career fellowship program.

Workshops &

Consultations

Sign up for one of our upcoming workshops, host a private webinar or workshop for your team or event, or schedule a private consultation.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resources

We’ve published dozens of articles and resource guides that center diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in science journalism. Browse this page to find articles on topics such as covering Indigenous communities, reporting and writing with trans-inclusion in mind, navigating bias in newsrooms, finding diverse sources, tracking source diversity, using alt-text to make stories more accessible, freelancing on a student visa, and much, much more.

More Resources

Pitch Database

Find more than 250 successful story pitches to a wide range of publications—or share your pitches with us!

Getting Started in Science Journalism

Are you a newcomer to the field? This collection of articles focuses on what you need to know to get started.

On the Origin of Science Writers

There’s no one “right” path into science journalism. Hear from dozens of science writers about how they got started.

The Open Notebook is an incredibly generous project, a gift to the science writer community. Everyone involved—the TON creators, the interviewers, the writers who reveal their methods—is helping teach the rest of us a master class in science writing.

Writing is a lonely art. The vast majority of the process, from coming up with ideas to structuring a piece, is carried out in solitude. When you start out, you barely have a clue about what you’re doing, let alone what seasoned professionals get up to. Getting those pros to deconstruct their own methods for all to see is a massive boon to aspiring science writers.

I consider myself lucky that The Open Notebook launched right as I started to pursue a career in science writing. Its pitch database, Storygrams, interviews and in-depth articles on the craft of science writing proved invaluable as I tried to break into the field, and I continue to rely on these resources for help and encouragement.

The Open Notebook offers not only a wealth of resources, it provides community to science writers at every stage of their career. TON embodies generosity. By reading the site’s expert and timely articles, we can become better storytellers together.

I recommend The Open Notebook to every writer, not just science journalists. Their story dissections are amazing, their pitch database is a goldmine, and their profiles of other writers are the best way to score insider tips and/or feel less alone in the struggle.

The Craft of Science Writing

How do you nail a nut graf? What makes one pitch successful and another fall flat? How do you find the right experts for a science story? You’ll find answers to these questions and many more in The Open Notebook’s first book, The Craft of Science Writing. With tips, tricks, and insights from some of the most skilled science journalists working today, you’ll get the resources you need. Consider this book your guided tour to the craft.