Professional Development Month Pitch Slam 1

Some of our field’s finest science editors will share what stories they’re looking for and give advice for how to pitch their publications.  As a participant, you will have the opportunity to present a 90-second story pitch of your own and receive live feedback from the panel.  The pitch slam will end with a Q&A during which you can ask general questions about pitching.

This session features:

Torie Bosch, the editor of Future Tense, “a project of Slate, New America, and Arizona State that looks at the implications of new technologies.”
Macon Morehouse, the news director at Science News.
Gene Russo, the editor of Front Matter, the science journalism section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
John Timmer, the science editor of Ars Technica.

Moderator: Richard Sima, freelance science writer, DCSWA VP

The event will be held on zoom. Register here.

If you are planning to present a pitch, please send a message to zoom@dcswa.org with the subject line “DCSWA Pitch Slam 1 – I have a pitch” (you can leave the body text blank if you’d like). This will help us get a rough estimate to reserve enough time for pitches.

Note: this session will not be recorded and attendees are expected to keep others’ pitches confidential.

Editor bios:

Slate, Future Tense | Torie Bosch 

Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, Arizona State University, and New America that explores the intersection of technology, science, policy, and society. She is the co-editor of What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent the Future (2019) and Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, both published by Unnamed Press. Torie is a graduate of Penn State University, where she majored in English with minors in business, media studies, and Latin. Follow her on Twitter @thekibosch or pitch her at torie.bosch@slate.com.

Science News | Macon Morehouse

Macon Morehouse joined Science News in December 2014. As news director, she draws on more than 30 years of journalism experience, from covering Congress at Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report to an eight-year stint in daily newspapers — first at The Charlotte Observer and then at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was part of the team covering the 1996 Olympic Games, to working in People magazine’s Washington, D.C. bureau, covering presidential campaigns, celebrity fly-ins, as well as medical breakthroughs as the magazine’s national medical correspondent. Prior to joining Science News, she was senior editor at National Geographic Explorer, science-focused classroom magazines for elementary and middle school students. Her love of science news stories and drive to bring those stories to a broad, smart, curious audience brought her to Science News.

PNAS’s Front Matter | Gene Russo

Gene Russo has been the editor of Front Matter, the science journalism section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, since 2014. For the eight years prior, he headed up the careers section at Nature. He also spent three years as a staff writer at The Scientist and about three years as a freelance science writer. Gene holds master’s degrees in environmental policy and history and philosophy of science, and studied English, biology, and philosophy as an undergraduate.

Ars Technica | John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. John has done over a decade’s worth of research in genetics and developmental biology at places like Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He’s been a speaker at the Nobel Dialogs, the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, and the Science Online meetings, and was one of the organizers of the SONYC discussion series. John has taught scientists how to communicate with each other and the public at Cornell Medical College and Stony Brook University. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.