Professional Development Month: Pitch Slam 3

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:

Editors:

Caryl-Sue Micalizio, managing editor at Eos, “a source for news and perspectives about Earth and space science.”
Kara Platoni, the science editor at Wired.
Janet Raloff, the editor at Science News for Students.
Michael Roston, the senior editor at The New York Times science desk.
Gene Russo, the editor of Front Matter, the science journalism section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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 3 – 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:

Eos | Caryl-Sue Micalizio

Caryl-Sue Micalizio joined Eos as its managing editor in 2019, after more than a decade creating and managing content at National Geographic. She has been a journalist since graduating from the University of California, Irvine, and has degrees in arts and humanities.

Wired | Kara Platoni

Kara Platoni is WIRED’s science editor and is based in the Bay Area. She oversees coverage of health, biotech, space, energy, and robotics stories. Prior to joining WIRED, she was a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and started her career as a staff writer for the East Bay Express. She is the author of We Have the Technology, a book about hacking sensory perception. 

Science News for Students | Janet Raloff

For more nearly 16 years, Janet Raloff has been the editor of Science News for Students, which covers all fields in STEM for anyone 12 and up (yes, including your grandmother). Prior to that, she was a writer for Science News on the environment, nutrition, and science policy. She was among the first to give national visibility to such issues as electromagnetic pulse weaponry and hormone-mimicking pollutants, and was the first globally to report on the widespread tainting of streams and groundwater sources with pharmaceuticals. 

Raloff is active in the Society of Environmental Journalists, which she helped found. With a background in physics, Raloff garnered undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Over the years, she has freelanced articles for more than 4 dozen publications. Her writing has won awards from a number of organizations.

The New York Times | Michael Roston

Michael Roston is a senior staff editor at The New York Times where he oversees coverage of spaceflight, planetary science and astronomy, produces the Trilobites column and assigns and edits many features that run in Science Times. 

A native of the City of Chicago, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University, with stints studying, interns and working in Singapore, Washington, D.C. and Indonesia before turning to journalism full-time. A specialist in digital reporting and editing, he worked at a range of media companies — Raw Story, HuffPost, the Village Voice, True/Slant, Forbes. He joined The Times in 2010, first as overnight home page producer, then becoming lead social media editor. Since 2015, he has been an editor in the science department.