We are pleased to announce the recipients of our newly established fellowship for early-career science journalists, sponsored by a generous grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. We received many excellent applications and would have been very […]
Making short videos can be an approachable on-ramp into multimedia work. But capturing snippets of science in video differs from print storytelling. Journalists diving into this medium will have to learn a few new skills so they can structure stories around visuals and pull research footage, photos, and their script into videos that viewers don’t want to scroll past.
Since the start of the pandemic, data journalists have had the difficult task of tracking massive amounts of inconsistent, ever-changing information around the coronavirus and wrangling it into visually appealing, digestible designs—on deadline. Here, four data journalists covering COVID-19 discuss the most challenging aspects of the gig and their approach to producing graphics that are accurate, informative, and crucially during the uncontrolled pandemic, actionable.
Among the various forms of science storytelling online, video has the most moving parts. To convey a story through writing, sound, and visuals, video creators need to ensure that each aspect plays well with the others. If they don’t, they risk confusing viewers, or perhaps worse, boring them. Here, Vox video producer Joss Fong tells us how she expertly achieved this balance in Vox‘s video about how scientists took the first photo of a black hole.
The winners of The World’s Finest (and Only … As Far as We Know) Science-Themed Peeps Diorama Contest have been chosen, and we’re happy to announce the crème(-filled eggs) de la crème(-filled eggs)!
Conforme se reduce el presupuesto de los medios periodísticos tradicionales y los editores tienen que desempeñar muchas tareas, a los escritores se les pide que asuman un papel más grande al darle forma a sus propias historias. Ya sea que se tenga al mejor editor del mundo o que no se tenga a ninguno, es necesario editarse a sí mismo para lograr la mejor historia posible.
Erica Klarreich’s August 2014 Quanta magazine article “A Tenacious Explorer of Abstract Surfaces” describes the career arc of Stanford University professor Maryam Mirzakhani, casting the mathematician—winner of the 2014 Fields Medal, often described as mathematics’ Nobel Prize—as a fearless and accomplished scholar. Here, Klarreich tells the story behind her story, including the decision to bury the information that Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields Medal.
When we launched The Open Notebook in October 2010, our goal was modest: to conduct a series of intermittent interviews with writers whose work we admired. It wasn’t long before we started hankering to do more, but […]
Good headlines achieve balance. They pique the reader’s interest without demanding it, they allude to the story without giving it away, and they give specific details without being technical. On top of that, good headlines should also be “funny, surprising, clear or crisp,” says Laura Helmuth, the science and health editor at Slate.
Audio and video provide alternate ways of crafting compelling narratives, but writing for multimedia outlets involves a different set of skills than writing for print. Here, science journalists and producers share their script-writing process—from choosing a medium, to piecing the story together, to clarifying interviews in post-production. And they highlight common pitfalls that writers new to multimedia should watch out for.
Imagine that you are a salesperson tasked with selling a special product. Most people know very little about the product, and many have had a bad experience with similar items. People can’t see what […]
Self-editing is a selfless endeavor. You cut, replace, rearrange, and endlessly reread—all for the reader’s benefit. “Journalism is all about having a sense of empathy with your audience,” says Dan Fagin, director […]
Writing a nut graf can feel like showing your work on a math test or stopping at traffic lights when no one’s around. Ask journalists about how they constructed a nut graf, and some […]
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