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On ScholarCast this week is Sarah Laskow, a writer, reporter and editor, based in New York City. Sarah writes about the environment, sustainability and a lot of other stuff and has bags of experience, having contributed at Grist, Salon and Newsweek.com amongst other places. She also edits the Smart News group blog at Smithsonian.com.
Sarah will talk about politics and science, the acquisition of free books, and zoo poop during the course of the week. But for right now, here's a short Q&A with Sarah.
Well, they're all connected, of course. I started dabbling in journalism because I liked writing. I started reporting because I quickly learned that it's easier to write good stories if you're a good reporter. And I could start working as an editor because I had reported and written stories for great editors who taught me how to write snappy headlines, keep copy clear, and make stories air tight.
As a freelancer, I have to try and think like an editor before I even write a story: if your pitch comes with a great headline, you're halfway to getting an assignment. Then, when I report a story, I'm thinking from the very beginning about how I'm going to write it. I always change my plan (a mental rough draft, I guess you could call it) as I talk to my sources, but if I'm thinking about how the story will work while I'm doing interviews, I'm more likely to ask good questions. After I have a draft of a story, I edit it before sending it in: if you send in a story that's over the word count or sloppy in some way, that's just a problem someone else has to deal with.
As a writer, though, you have your editor for back-up. As an editor, the final decision falls to you: What will the headline be? Is this post ready to publish?
Why did you opt to cover the environment and sustainability?
I'm one of those people who has a hard time choosing what they want to focus on. I'm interested in politics and policy, but I also wanted to write stories that had people in them. I had worked on a couple of stories with an environmental angle at the Center for Public Integrity, where I was a staff writer for a few years, and I liked that those stories mixed politics, policy and science, while still telling stories about real people.
When I started freelancing, one piece of advice I got was to develop a beat and...it's true! When you have a beat, editors are more likely to think of you when they want to cover a particular type of story. The first year I was freelancing, I pitched and wrote a few stories covering environmental issues, although I was pitching stories on a bunch of other topics, too. The second year, I had a couple of editors offer me regular gigs because they knew I had been covering this beat. I started writing even more environmental stories, and more assignments on similar topics followed.
What will you be writing about here on ScholarCast over the next few days?
I want to talk a little bit about what happens when politics and science bump up against each other. That's obviously a huge issue in the environmental world, because you have a whole section of Americans who have attacked the legitimacy of climate science. It's not just a right wing problem, though: lefties also get mushy about science when it's convenient, too. This topic is also going to give me an excuse to talk about these gross but amazing inch-long carrion beetles that I was briefly obsessed with.
I'm also planning on writing about a cool book I'm reading right now, The Republic of Nature. And, yah, zoo poop.
Can you, in one sentence, describe one time when science made you go "wow"?
Oh, man, it is hard to pick one, since one of my gigs—writing for Grist List—is all about trying to find stories that will make people's brains explode with awesome.
Ok, here you go:
After rats decimated most of their kind, a tiny population of Lord Howe Island stick insects, which are giant and look like aliens struggling out of a human torso, survived for 80 years on a remote South Pacific island on one little bush, which scientists just found earlier this year.
But that's a really long sentence. If I were editing it, I would chop it into two, at least. Also, I cheated by stealing some of the clauses from this post I wrote when this story first bubbled up. (If you really want to go "wow," go to that post and watch the video of the stick insect hatching. It is mind-blowing.)