At 6:20 a.m. on a January morning in 2013, journalist Doug Fox watched a team of scientists pull a bottle of water up through Antarctic ice half a mile thick. After hauling more than one million pounds of equipment some 600 miles inland, the researchers had drilled into this subglacial lake for the first time. They were looking for signs of life. Anything that could survive in this dark, frigid environment might offer a clue as to whether the icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn could also harbor life. Once the bottle surfaced, the researchers crowded into an on-site field laboratory where they decanted its honey-colored water into a clear tube. The team then inserted an electrode and found that the water conducted electricity well, a sign that it could be full of mineral salts—a perfect food source for microbes.
Because Fox was reporting from Antarctica alongside the scientists, he was able to capture scenes like this, which would be hard to recreate from interviews alone. In the resulting 2013 story for Discover magazine, Fox described the tense conversations that unfolded as the team tried once, twice, three times to send a camera down the borehole into the lake; the swirl of silt when the camera bumped into the lake floor; the way one scientist whacked chunks of frost off the cable with a hammer as the bottle of lake water ascended; and the cheers when the team found that the water might be able to support life.
Details like these bring a science story to life and transport audiences into the action. But getting on scene and in the mix isn’t easy. Many outlets have limited travel budgets, and grants from external organizations or other sources are competitive, can require securing an assignment in advance, and might create conflicts of interest.
With a solid foundation of research and a flexible reporting plan, it’s possible to overcome these challenges and assemble a productive trip that adds vivid imagery to your reporting, produces multiple stories, and even leads to new field-reporting opportunities.
Funding Your Idea
Traveling for a story requires access and money. Building authority on your specific topic and angle is the surest path for securing the trust necessary for both. Around 10 years ago, for example, freelance science journalist Virginia Gewin became fascinated by seed banks and sustainable agriculture. Over several months, she embedded herself in the research by speaking with dozens of scientists, attending conference talks, and following up with sources when they published interesting new studies. She was particularly interested in several agricultural organizations in Malaysia, and she followed their work carefully.
Selling multiple stories helps you get the most value from your time, especially on longer trips when you aren’t taking other work.
But traveling to Malaysia would be pricey—far outside the budget of many magazines. So, in 2015, Gewin turned her hard-earned authority into a competitive application for a fellowship with The Alicia Patterson Foundation and won a year-long spot for 2016 with a $40,000 stipend. While in Malaysia, she reported feature stories on wild relatives of the banana that could help bolster the fruit’s resistance to disease and on cultivating crop varieties that could be healthier for people and the planet but aren’t yet farmed at large scales.
Many writers find they have better luck placing a story that requires international reporting if they get external financial support, as Gewin did. Having funding already lined up makes your pitch more attractive since it lowers costs for the publication. Grants from organizations like the Pulitzer Center help support many expensive reporting trips. Both the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the Society of Environmental Journalists maintain databases of grants and fellowships that fund reporting projects of various lengths.
Approach grant applications the same way you would approach complex feature pitches. Make sure you have a story (not just a topic) and solid background research. Gewin says she balances unpaid pre-reporting by writing related shorter pieces like Q&As and news stories that don’t scoop the feature she wants to pitch. In her applications, she makes sure to highlight what’s interesting or timely about her proposal and includes quotes from a few important players to show that she’s already in touch. Having a solid start on reporting also helps you write the pitch or pitches needed to secure letters of interest from outlets, which some funders require.
That foundation of in-depth research can also improve the chances that a publication will finance your reporting directly. Few outlets have extensive travel budgets, but some, such as National Geographic, do fund international work. Fox has received support from New Scientist to report multiple stories from Australia and from The Atlantic to report on microbes living deep underground in Oman.
Publication funding and grants aren’t the only way to get yourself on the scene. Independent journalist Anne Pinto-Rodrigues piggybacks work onto personal travel when it makes sense to do so. In between trips, she keeps a running list of story ideas to explore when she travels. “Usually it’s not possible to get everything done,” she says, “but I try and do as much as I can in the time that I have.”
In general, travel funding should be independent from your sources to avoid a conflict of interest. But there are some remote areas where it’s not possible to travel independently. Private citizens can currently travel to bases in Antarctica only on specific government-operated flights or boats, for example. For several Antarctic reporting trips, Fox traveled on funding from a researcher’s grant, though he says such opportunities are becoming less common as budgets tighten. Navigating that entanglement required clear and open communication. Fox made his editors aware of the unusual access barriers in advance and clearly disclosed the financial support in the text of his resulting stories.
Lining Up Multiple Stories
If a writer, funder, and publication are putting a significant amount of time and money into a reporting trip, it’s in everyone’s best interest to stretch those resources as far as possible. Reporting trips can often spawn multiple stories, especially with careful planning.
If your trip focuses on one major field study, keep in mind that it could be months or years until the results are published. Consider other angles you can cover in the meantime, such as those that center the history, the research process, or the people involved. Fox, for example, penned several stories for different outlets that drew from his 2012–2013 Antarctic expedition, including a piece on diatom fossils in the mud from the bottom of the lake and a character-focused feature about the people who ran the ice drill. Because he stayed in touch with the researchers, he was able to get a copy of their study about six months before it published in Nature, and he wrote a feature on the results—130,000 cells per milliliter of subglacial lake water and nearly 4,000 distinct types of microbes—timed to the study’s embargo.
Remember that things in the field don’t always go as planned. When sketching out a travel budget, build in some padding to cover contingencies.
Alternatively, you might center a reporting trip around one or two big stories but report a few smaller, unrelated ones while you’re there. While Lisa Grossman was a staff writer at New Scientist, the publication paid for her travel to an Alaskan glacier in 2014 to report on a research group that was testing a robot that might be used to search for life on icy moons. The outlet also asked Grossman, now an astronomy reporter at Science News, to find and report a few other stories on the trip, so she looked for ideas at the nearby University of Alaska Anchorage and a U.S. Geological Survey volcano observatory.
As a freelancer, selling multiple stories also helps you get the most value from your time, especially on longer trips when you aren’t taking—and getting paid for—other work. In 2024, Shi En Kim, now an environmental reporting fellow at The Arizona Republic and cofounder of Sequencer magazine, received a Pulitzer Center Global Health Reporting Fellowship to travel to Brazil and report on the impacts of neurotoxic pesticides on farmers. She also made plans to cover other stories while she was there. Before heading to Brazil, Kim connected with a researcher who was studying the hydrology of Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul, which had experienced massive flooding earlier that year. As a result, she covered the aftermath of the floods for Mongabay. Keep an eye out, too, for other leads that arise within your planned reporting: Kim also wrote a Sequencer piece about the discovery of a fascinating new dinosaur fossil by a researcher who worked at the same university as the hydrologist.
Planning with Flexibility in Mind
It’s important to remember that things in the field don’t always go as planned. When sketching out a travel budget, build in some padding to cover contingencies. Reporting internationally or in remote areas can make even minor mishaps especially expensive, says Brazil-based freelance journalist Sofia Moutinho, who has reported several stories from the Amazon rainforest. Transit there is often only possible via river boats that run on diesel fuel and break frequently, she says, so she must be prepared for extra costs such as refueling. By clearly communicating the remote and volatile nature of the locale to her funders and providing a budget range that anticipates possible surprises, she’s avoided having to cover unplanned reporting costs.
Some journalists prefer to leave room in their schedules to follow new leads that arise.
The stories you plan to report can also take an unexpected turn. You might miss a key moment you hoped to center in your story, or equipment or experiments could flop. For Fox’s 2012–2013 Antarctic reporting trip, during which researchers drilled into the subglacial lake, he felt it was important to “talk about [possible] failure ahead of time.” He set up a fallback plan with his editor at Discover—a short piece he could write about the challenges of Antarctic fieldwork so that they would get a return on the investment no matter what. There was good reason to do so. The team of scientists initially struggled to drill a borehole 2,600 feet below the surface of the ice to reach the lake. (Two other research teams that season had already failed.) Fortunately, Fox was ultimately able to write the story he had originally pitched.
With a plan—and a backup plan—in hand, schedule out your essential reporting in advance to use your time in the field effectively. Some writers pack their field trips full of interviews and site visits to make sure they get everything they need, particularly if they can’t stay long. Sushma Subramanian, a freelance journalist and journalism associate professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, lines up interview slots in advance. “I’m often doing these research trips during a short break from my university teaching schedule,” she says. “So, I want to make sure that I’m using that time wisely.”
Other journalists prefer to leave room in their schedules to follow new leads that arise. “It’s really nice to be in a location and talk to people, even if they’re unrelated to what you’re reporting at that point in time, because a lot of ideas can come from those conversations,” Pinto-Rodrigues says. Following those leads can help flesh out your background knowledge or stories in progress, build relationships with sources, and possibly lead to new opportunities to tell impactful stories from the field. “Many stories that I’ve reported have led to another story,” Pinto-Rodrigues says, “if not the immediate next story, [then] a few stories down the line.”
Skyler Ware is a freelance science writer covering physical and Earth sciences and an early-career fellow at The Open Notebook supported by the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. Her work has appeared in Eos, SciShow, Live Science, and others, and she was the 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Science News. Skyler has a PhD in chemistry from Caltech. Find her on Bluesky @skylerdware.bsky.social.