air pollution
Featured image credit: souravdas/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. I recently moved out of Delhi. The air made it easier to decide to leave. What I’ve learnt is that a source of amusement to many friends in the country’s south is actually a nightmare up north, where a
environmental activism
Featured image credit: mamnaimie/Flickr, CC BY 2.0 I’ve developed a lousy habit of publishing posts before they’re ready to go, and not being careful enough about how I’m wording things. It happened recently with the review of Matthew Cobb’s book and then last evening
Anil Ananthaswamy
On June 24, I was invited to talk at the NCBS Science Writing Workshop, held every year for 10 days. The following notes are some of my afterthoughts from that talk. Science journalism online is doing better now than science journalism in print, in India. But before we discuss the
IANS
A piece in Zee News, headlined ISRO to test next reusable launch vehicle after studying data of May 23 flight, begins thus: The Indian Space Research Organisation has successfully launched it’s first ever ‘Made-in-India’ space shuttle RLV-Technology Demonstrator on May 23, 2016. After the launch, the Indian space agency
anthropogenic global warming
Featured image credit: mistermoss/Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Journalism’s engagement with a convergent body of knowledge is an interesting thing in two ways. From the PoV of the body, journalism is typically seen as an enabler, an instrument for furthering goals and which is adjacent at best until
communication
First, there is information. From information, people distill knowledge, and from knowledge, wisdom. Information is available on a lot of topics and in varying levels of detail. Knowledge on topics is harder to find – and even more hard is wisdom. This is because knowledge and wisdom require work (to fact-check
archiving
Bad journalism: A Hindustan Times report on March 2 claims a high-schooler from West Bengal won a “prestigious” scholarship sponsored by NASA to study at Oxford University, having been selected on the back of a theory she had developed on blackholes. The piece was one-sided. Avoidable journalism: The report – one
explainers
One of the first lessons in journalism 101 is the inverted pyramid, a style of writing where the journalist presents the more important information higher up the piece. This way, the copy sort of tapers down in importance the longer it runs. The idea was that such writing served two
denial
When writing one of my first pieces for The Hindu, I remember being called out for using a lot of jargon. While the accusation itself may have been justified, the word my supervisor chose as an example of the problem was surprising: “refraction”. He wanted me to spell it out
grad school
When I decided to quit The Hindu and leave for grad studies at New York University, my parents, relatives, their friends, my father’s boss at work, his family and their friends all said that I’d made the right decision. “If you don’t finish your higher studies now,
Dan Fagin
Classes at NYU have started! On day one, Michael Balter, who is a senior correspondent for Science, kicked off the program with an introduction to interviewing by, simply enough, interviewing each one of us, having us introduce ourselves at the same time. I’m not sure about how much others
business models
(Formatting issues fixed.) Through an oped in Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor makes a timely case for explanatory – or explainer – journalism being far from a passing fad. Across the many factors that he argues contribute to its rise and persistence in western markets, there is evidence that he believes explainer journalism’
