Knight Science Journalism Tracker - Updates

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Eighteen months ago three of the most successful spanish science bloggers decided to join forces. They gathered other bloggers to create the online platform Amazings.es. It is now the most popular science blog in the Spanish speaking world with original content from more than 100 contributors. Their presence in the science communication landscape is growing rapidly (disclosure: I’ve collaborated with them). Amazing’s current project is to print a magazine with 4000-word articles by 10 of their contributors. Funding is through crowd-sourcing: Last summer Amazings announced intention to print a magazine and that it needed 16.000 euros to do it. Readers were able to buy the magazine in advance for 9 euros. If the 16.000 euros were not reached, nobody would be charged. If they exceeded, print magazines would be sent to the homes and benefits distributed among the writers. They finally collected nearly 25.000 euros (! 155% of the project). Writers earned more for their pieces than the norm among Spanish magazines. Thenew publicatin has 95 pages, [...]

The AP’s Seth Borenstein has a much-needed story out on the space program envisioned by Newt Gingrich. One suspects that as the former and still Mr. Speaker’s presidential campaign appears to be on a trajectory well short of orbit, it may not much matter for long. Nonetheless, Borenstein assembles a good argument that, rather than some sort of wonky outlier on space policy, Gingrich’s ambitious vision of sending Americans in large numbers to and beyond the moon and real soon has a rich and central place in history. Previous administrations have repeatedly expressed similar aims. Borenstein’s story is so! und enough on the historic standing of Gingrich’s brand of space enthusiasm, but as a science journalist he could have looked harder for sources to explain whether there is scientific merit in such a space vision – even if it is not his alone - by a man who asserts he is science-friendly?

Among the saner reactions to such expansive imaginings is one at Slate, where Arizona State [...]

A tricky story appeared in the news yesterday and this morning: The Susan G. Komen foundation has cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. The story, of course, lands right in the middle of the decades-long, highly contentious national debate over abortion. The mainstream media gave me the facts, but I couldn’t have understood the story nearly as well without help from bloggers, with their explicit, clashing points of view. On controversies like this, especially, the blogs are an essential complement to the mainstream media.

I backed into this story by first reading Barbara Feder Ostrov‘s overview in her blog for Reporting on Health. This is aimed at reporters, not general readers, but any general readers who stumble across it will get a solid introduction to the story with links to some good sources, including the AP story, which is what I clicked on first. David Crary‘s story began this way:

NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for [...]

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