Bud Ward covers topics of interest to freelancers, including cash flow, incorporation, health insurance, business expenses and more.
Stormwater becomes a big media story during disasters such as floods and hurricane surges, and it's essential to cover the basics then. But there are dozens of related issues that can contribute to the disaster, and covering them in advance can help your audience understand ways of possibly preventing the peak crises.
By JAY LETTO
The Miami extravaganza was easily SEJ’s most ambitious annual conference ever. The star-studded Wednesday evening opening reception set the stage for a whirlwind of activity and news-making field trips and presentations that kept members running and writing till they collapsed Sunday morning at the peaceful Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.
SEJ President Carolyn Whetzel discusses a recent project by Columbia Journalism Review and ProPublica which revealed it’s not just SEJ members who have a tough time gaining access to federal information or scheduling interviews with scientists or other experts at federal agencies.
A landmark Supreme Court decision awarded Port Townsend residents the right to know about the potential location of explosives on the Indian Island Naval Magazine near their town. After losing the case, the Defense Department bolstered its legal grounds for secrecy by asking Congress to slip into the 2012 Defense Authorization an amendment creating a new statutory exemption to FOIA for the DOD.
A bill that would mandate open public access, free of charge, to papers resulting from federally funded research is currently languishing in the GOP-controlled House. Private for-profit publishing companies aim to stop it, preserving their control over the science publishing market. One of these is Elsevier, the largest single academic publisher in the world, currently being boycotted by almost 7,000 researchers worldwide.
The Patton Boggs lobbying firm, which represents the mining industry, has sent letters threatening unspecified legal action against four scientific journals if they publish results of a study about the exposure of miners to diesel emissions, according to Science magazine.
This year's Farm Bill deliberations have been less transparent than ever before. In that spirit, SEJ's WatchDog shares a backgrounder, published by the Federation of American Scientists, on the 2012 Farm Bill done by the Congressional Research Service — which keeps their taxpayer-funded reports secret from the public.
The complaints came out at the Vancouver meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this month — the main multidisciplinary science conference held yearly on the continent. Also during the meeting, a letter from six journalism and science groups called on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to end the muzzling-scientists policy was released.
