Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
Science news was once relegated to obscure locations inside the newspaper or given brief and/or sensational treatment in the electronic media. Not any more, however. Consider the sheer volume of news coverage devoted to such issues as global warming, pandemic flu, genetically modified foods, cloning, stem cell research, evolution, health care, bioterrorism, catastrophic storms…
While this week’s resource is targeted specifically at science journalists, my guess is that you’ll find it useful and/or interesting as well — even if you don’t work with science information.
Knight Science Journalism Tracker
Source: Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is a relatively new service for science writers and editors, which provides ongoing access to work being done by others in the same field. “Our goal is to provide a broad sampling of the past day’s science news and, where possible, of news releases or other news tips related to publication of science news in the general circulation news media, mainly of the U.S. Our goal is to have a new batch of posts up each day by 1 pm Eastern time.” Here, journalists can “suggest stories and…comment constructively on one-another’s work” — the goal being “peer review within science journalism.”
The “Head Tracker” is Charles Petit, an award-winning science and technology writer with more than 25 years of experience. Each posting here includes “brief descriptions of news stories with occasional commentary, headlines and links to their publishers’ Web sites…. Priority goes to stories that report or analyze new scientific research, and to reports on science policy and issues.” The assortment on Wednesday afternoon included items on “ocean acidification,” teenage drinking and the brain, avian extinction, whales and sonar, Tylenol and liver damage, anthropology, genetically modified rice and a guy who caught a piranha “as big as a dinner plate” in the Des Plaines River in Illinois. And much more.
Archives here go back to April 2006, and the entire site is keyword searchable. You can browse through a collection of Petit’s Picks — e.g., stories highlighted by the “head tracker.” Links on the right-hand side allow you to view only environmental, health & medicine, or general science stories. An RSS feed is available; RSS is the perfect medium for keeping up with a site like this.
If you wish to post to the site, you must register; your identity will be verified as “a journalist or other type of person for whom the site is designed” — an obvious quality-control mechanism. However, anyone can suggest stories for inclusion.
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on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 and is filed under Uncategorized.
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