Megha Satyanarayana worked at several newspapers and an online news startup before landing at Chemical & Engineering News. She has covered suburban crime, public health, science and technology, and much more. She also knows a bit about audience engagement and multimedia reporting, and is happy to have landed back in Texas, where sentences start, end, and contain in all grammatical spaces the word y’all, and it works. Really.
Growing up in a family of Chinese immigrant mathematicians and scientists, then ditching my PhD in biology for a career in journalism makes me somewhat of a maverick. But that transition was fun. My left-brain love of science’s rigor and logic found solace in journalism’s Five Ws and the inverted pyramid. For a wannabe creative who didn’t like to make up stories or write about herself, news writing was just the ticket. There was a template, and it worked.
It’s one of the first, and likely most intimidating, assignments for a fledgling science reporter. “Here,” your editor says. “Write up this paper that’s coming out in Science this week.” And suddenly you’re staring at an impenetrable PDF—pages of scientific jargon that you’re supposed to understand, interview the author and outside commenters about, and describe in ordinary English to ordinary readers.
Whether reporting in a 111-degree desert or in Antarctica, science journalists often face difficult or perilous field conditions in the course of their work. The challenges of reporting from a canoe deep in the Amazon jungle are different from those of reporting on migrant health in a border town infamous for sex trafficking—but wherever they go, science reporters must take steps to ensure they, and the information they gather, return from the field unscathed.
The science surrounding so much about food is complex, confusing, and constantly changing. In her New Republic story “Altered Tastes,” about the up-and-coming science of neurogastronomy, Maria Konnikova asks both “What is delicious?” and “How do we solve our world’s nutrition crisis?” Konnikova focuses her story on the fine-dining chef Heston Blumenthal, who is undertaking the gargantuan task of improving dining and health through the use of science. Here's a look at what makes her story great.
A common saying in the autism community goes: “If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.” That is, we autistic people all vary in our traits. Some of these are problematic, but others can be beneficial. Because we observe and process the world differently, our writing can present unique perspectives. Autistic writers who learn to capitalize on the favorable traits and manage the more challenging ones can thrive in this profession.
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