Author Archives: Wayne

By Tashiana Osborne

Have you ever been stumped while trying to explain a complicated concept to someone? Maybe it was something within your specific niche, or maybe it was something you yourself had spent hours researching to better understand?

The Sci-Mation session of DCSWA’s 2015 Professional Development Day aimed to help writers and others do that hard explaining in a different way, by breaking apart overwhelming science concepts using animations rather than words. Panelists shared tips and resources for those who may be new to animation software.

Lauren Wolf and Adam Dylewski of the American Chemical Society highlighted the process and the software they use to make science come to life for their thousands of YouTube viewers. To begin, they brainstorm about what their audience may be interested in learning more about. They then approach the topic by “speaking in chemistry,” but soon begin to convert scientific explanations into shorter and more simplified phrases. The duo then adds images that help with the explanations; these will later be readjusted, revised and animated. They prefer using Wipster to first add comments about what to edit, and then switch to Adobe After Effects for their final edits. The goal is to produce a three-minute video in three to five days.

Dylewski stresses that it is not difficult to put together a video that draws the attention of viewers. “You have to be a little bit better than the average-bar on YouTube,” he said.

See one of their finished “Reactions” YouTube videos here.

Sean Kelley, an animator with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Joint Quantum Institute, swears by the free, open-source animating software Blender, which he uses to create and edit 2D and 3D animations. Additionally, Blender can accurately show both small- and large-scale physical and biological processes. “Blender is really useful for showing things that aren’t visible,” said Kelley. It offers a “timeline” to adjust, modify and build up animations, and allows you to customize both 2D and 3D animations to create truly unique and intricate computer art.

For those looking to build their animating skills, Kelley encourages “making an investment in yourself” by paying for animation software courses or searching for free online training. The first site Kelley recommends visiting is Animation Resources.

Adam Cole of NPR stressed how helpful animations can be in explaining complex processes. “If you can’t see it, then animate it!” he said. He showed several different stages of Vimeo and YouTube videos he had produced over the years using his preferred editing software, Adobe After Effects.

Cole sketched out a multi-step process for storytelling through animations:

1. Hand-sketch a general storyboard on a whiteboard (before writing script)
2. Draw out each moment/screenshot
3. Make initial round of edits on storyboard before wasting effort by animating first
4. Make rough animation in After Effects—he referred to this draft as his “Animatic”
5. Checks to see that animated entrances match the video’s audio

Cole highlighted the importance of making the main point as clear as possible to viewers through animations. “You have to think, how can the narrator speak for the images?” he said.

Cole’s upgraded version of an “Animatic”

Cole’s example of a 3D animated video on NPR’s YouTube channel

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An editor works behind the scenes, taking all of the blame but none of the credit. This is one of the many characteristics of a good editor, according to a panel of experienced science editors at the DCSWA 2015 Professional Development Day session “Upping Your Editing Game.” The panel gave tips and best-practice advice to both new and experienced editors.

Getting started

There are many paths to becoming a successful editor, but most start out as writers, as was the case with Erika Engelhaupt, now online editor for National Geographic. “The dirty little secret is that most editors learn to do it on the fly,” she said.

The best way to break into editing as a writer, said Engelhaupt, is to edit a colleague or friend who needs help, or work at a magazine with a small staff where everybody does a little of everything. This is a great chance to learn new skills, and to find out if you really like or hate editing, she said.

Don’t be obnoxious

“The golden rule is to treat others as you would want to be treated, and edit others as you would want to be edited,” Engelhaupt said.

In order to follow this rule, there are a number of steps a good editor should follow. Don’t be obnoxious if you don’t have to be, advised Tim Appenzeller, chief news editor at Science. “The truth about editing is that you are going to annoy people; they might be grateful at the end, but along the way there is going to be some tension,” he said.

To avoid, or at least diminish, this tension, editors should answer their emails, not waste writer’s time by sitting on pitches, and know when to let go and stop editing, Appenzeller said. By following these guiding principles, editors will find that writers want to work with them, and they will build trusting relationships.

Trust

Trust is at the core of the writer-editor relationship. The editor trusts the writer to do the work producing the story, but an editor’s job is much more complex, explained the panel. Editors must be moving behind the scenes.

Part of an editor’s job is to protect his or her writers, said Laura Helmuth, the science and health editor at Slate. An editor must give all the credit to the writer, but be ready to take the blame when something goes wrong with a story, she said.

The editor is the unseen mover: selling stories up the chain of command or advocating for it to the social media team, added Engelhaupt. “You’ll know that you are doing a good job when writers come back to you,” she said. “When they keep improving over time, that means you have helped them get a little bit stronger.”

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By Linnea Bennett

Many journalists picture an international reporting trip as a time to type prose in a Parisian café or scribble notes in the shadow of the Taj Mahal. But the topics that international reporters cover often lead them to much more rugged terrain—imagine covering conflict in sub-Saharan Africa or climate change in Vanuatu.

And yet there might be one thing more difficult than reporting abroad: finding the funding to do so.

This last point is what brought four panelists together at DCSWA’s 2015 Professional Development Day for a panel on international reporting. Each panelist represented an organization that provides grants or programs to help journalists report abroad.

From investigative journalism to environmental pieces, the organizations all had two basic tenets to their grant application process:

Pitch a story on an under-reported topic or that takes place in an under-reported country.
Have a media plan, preferably including an editor or contact at an organization who has expressed interested in publishing your piece.
None of the panelists’ organizations require grantees to have previous international reporting experience, nor do they require journalists to be full-time staff at a news organization. In fact, some of the organizations, like the Fund for Investigative Journalism prefer to support freelancers. For all of them, a well-thought-out media dissemination plan, with contacts at potential publishers, will suffice.

Aside from funding opportunities, the panel offered some advice on reporting abroad, which, for both veterans and first-timers, can be a daunting task.

Panel moderator Meaghan Parker, of the Wilson Center and the Society of Environmental Journalists, opened the event by joking, “Welcome to international science reporting—or, how to get paid to go on vacation.” But Parker, who has served as editor to several international reporting projects, was quick to point out that international reporting is not always a glamorous gig. “This is not sipping drinks and wearing sandals, but doing work in sometimes dangerous places,” she said.

Steve Sapienza of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting recommended that first-time travelers find a “fixer”—a person native to the city or country, who serves as a translator and guide, and is sometimes even a local journalist. A fixer is critical for helping reporters learn the local beat, organizing meetings and interviews, and, when one is reporting from a place that’s less-than-friendly to the press, even navigating the legal system when in a pinch. “Sometimes, it’s even your driver—depending on your budget,” Sapienza added.

One final tip from the panel addressed technology. All of the panelists agreed that getting a cell phone abroad is critical to reporting, and is generally both cheaper and less of a hassle than it is here in the States. Most international plans even come with pretty decent data packages. (Note: the panelists pointed out that none of this applies in Brazil, which, apparently, is a pretty difficult place to get a phone).

Some organizations, such as the International Center for Journalists, sponsor specific programs where many of these details are worked out ahead of time. The center has a broad geographic reach, with programs in countries like Japan and Austria.

The main objective of panel members was to remind journalists—staff and freelancers alike—that international reporting is a critically important field, and that their organizations are here to help journalists keep it thriving. As Melody Wilson of the International Reporting Project reminded the crowd, “We’re just here to support good journalism.”

For more information about the grants discussed at the panel, check out the resources below.

Organizations & Opportunities for Funding:

• Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism
• Fund for Investigative Journalism *Pitch must be an investigative story.
• Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• Check out recent grant-funded stories on: marketing nuclear energy in Russia, tracking data on Ebola, and effects of ocean acidification on Oregon sea life.
• International Center for Journalists – Bringing Home the World International Journalism Fellowship
• International Reporting Project
• IJNET – International Journalists’ Network
• Earth Journalism Network (A Project of Internews)

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The recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and the virus’s spread to the U.S., sent the American news media into a state of collective frenzy and spawned thousands of news stories. As a science writer, it was hard not to notice that there was a tremendous amount of misinformation to be found at every corner. I was forced to ask myself, what is the best way to communicate in this environment?

This quandary was the subject of the “Ebola: Case Study” session at DCSWA’s 2015 Professional Development Day. The panelists, Bill Hall, news director at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, Joel Achenbach, reporter at the Washington Post, and Virgie Townsend, senior editor of communications and media at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, had all been in the eye of the Ebola storm and gave us an opportunity to reflect and learn.

Speaking first, Hall laid out the basics of risk perception and communication based on research conducted in this field over the past few decades. Discussing the importance of addressing both real and perceived risks in an emergency, he explained how the government channeled people’s fear into positive actions by encouraging them to check official Twitter feeds and educate themselves with the myriad of CDC communications materials on Ebola, including videos, fact sheets and infographics. This helped reduce the spread of unfounded rumors and fears, he said. Hall also emphasized that any organization communicating risk in a crisis should acknowledge fear and express empathy. “People want to know that you care,” he said.

Achenbach provided the view from inside a newsroom, explaining what he saw as the responsibility of journalists during the crisis. Amidst the fear-mongering, “our challenge at the Post was to be a good filter of the news so that we would not feed the hysteria.” This was not easy, he said, because even as he and his colleagues relied heavily on experts like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Thomas Frieden, the information available was limited. Achenbach also mentioned that there were a few scientists whose views on the chances of Ebola mutating were outside mainstream scientific opinion, and journalists had the tough task of deciding how much “time and ink to give the outlier view,” especially when these views were being given coverage by other news outlets.

Townsend described her experience handling the crisis, pointing out that “the [American] public felt betrayed” when health care workers in the U.S. contracted Ebola, and that this contributed to a large portion of the panic response. She also discussed how social media, as disruptive as they were in spreading rumors about Ebola, could also be valuable tools for risk communicators to monitor public sentiment and craft their messages accordingly.

One key lesson from all three panelists was that mixed messages almost always have negative impacts. Illustrating this point, they said, was the example of Frieden stating that the CDC would “stop Ebola in its tracks.” Shortly thereafter, two nurses contracted the disease, eroding the public’s faith in the ability of the health system to manage the crisis. Even though Frieden had explicitly stated that a few cases of Ebola were to be expected, that part of the message was lost in the surrounding cacophony.

The session ended with a lively Q&A session that provided further insights and summarized the lessons learned during the Ebola crisis.

See all PDD 2015 highlights

By Allison Opitz

Science writing relies heavily on methods of both fiction and journalism—a delicate combination of literary techniques combined with the factual nature of journalism. A writer should engage the reader by creating characters, conflict, setting, dialogue, and telling details, but with one caveat: It all has to be true. This caution came from author Richard Panek, one of three panelists making up the “Secrets from Skillful Storytellers” session at DCSWA’s 2015 Professional Development Day in Washington, D.C.

The session’s central theme was how to tell a great scientific story, focusing on short, precise narrative. Panek offered a literary perspective; the other two panel members approached the topic from the journalistic side.

Christopher Joyce, a science desk correspondent at NPR, offered tips on how to tell stories orally. “Audio is a visual medium,” he said, where the writer’s task is to create a “movie in somebody’s head.” As a result, the writing must be “lean,” excluding what does not serve to drive the story.

Often, though, writers have difficulty writing shorter, linear pieces, as was the case early in the career of Liz Szabo, a medical news reporter for USA Today. “I would put everything I really think absolutely had to be in there, and it turns out that I needed to cut X number of words,” she said. As a former Victorian literature major, she had been trained to write long, but “being forced [to write short pieces] makes you prioritize” what needs to be there.

All of the panelists stressed the importance of creating a scene, no matter the length of the story. Much of the information for the scene comes from talking with the sources to “make them unpack their story,” as Szabo described, and asking open-ended questions, such as “Why?” or “What do you make of that?” or “And then what happened?” (as suggested by Joyce).

When asked about difficult sources on tough topics, especially in investigations, Szabo said, “Let people talk, because they’ll hang themselves so often.”

“If you want to be everyone’s best friend, choose another profession,” Joyce added.

For good conclusions, writers should “pick closing lines that summarize, but hint at where the story might go,” said Panek. Szabo said that a story should end with “a quote that looks out to the future,” and Joyce said that a story should answer the “so what?” question. Panek added that a conclusion needs to “call back” the original thesis. That way, the story is self-contained and memorable to the reader or listener.

In short, scientific stories use elements of fiction—characters, conflict and resolution, exposition—to tell the truth.

See all PDD 2015 highlights