Shifting Gears: New Directions in Science Writing

A one-day workshop convened by the Northern California Science Writers Association @ San Francisco State University on October 16, 2004

For the third time in the last four years, the Northern California Science Writers Association (NCSWA) organized a workshop for science writers and students in the San Francisco Bay Area. This year, the theme was how to push the envelope: branching into new career directions, making innovative use of research tools, and pursuing projects and topics that might seem daunting. Our keynote speakers, K.C. Cole of the Los Angeles Times and David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, energized the audience of nearly 100 writers with tales from their own stellar careers.

In response to feedback from past workshop attendees, the NCSWA board of directors wished to broaden the audience for this workshop beyond those who attended on October 16. Moreover, some of the panels were concurrent, making it impossible for writers to hear every discussion that looked interesting. Our solution was to ask the ten students in this year's class of the Science Communication program at UC Santa Cruz to report on the workshop, as an independent assignment outside of their regular coursework.

The results are posted here. There is an overview article, one story for each of the keynote talks, and five articles on the various panel discussions. Bylines for these eight articles appear with the stories. The other two class members, Susan Brown and Hugh Powell, served as editors and overall coordinators of the project. Use the menu to the right to navigate to each of the respective articles.

The NCSWA board of directors would like to thank all of the panelists, who donated their time on a Saturday to speak about their careers and their favorite writing tools and approaches. Their names appear in each of the panel articles. Major credit also goes to the board members who took on the time-consuming task of organizing each panel: Dawn Levy (tools to dig deeper), Mary Miller (innovation journalism), Charlie Petit (mid-career fellowships), Sarah Yang (back to basics), and Lynn Yarris (writing books).

We hope you will find these reports useful, and we welcome any comments you may have.

--Robert Irion, workshop organizer, irion@nasw.org

Overview