How Science News has been a training ground for young science journalists
Mentorship and skills development have long been part of our ethos
![a close-up photo of a desk. One hand on a computer keyboard while the other hand takes notes](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/032622_mt_bootcamp_feat.jpg?fit=1030%2C580&ssl=1)
Interns at Science News learn to write about unfamiliar fields and turn around stories quickly.
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When I was hired as a summer intern at Science News in 2017, I was equal parts excited and anxious. I’d heard the job had a steep learning curve. But given that physics and astronomy writer Marcia Bartusiak, my graduate school mentor, had gotten her start as a Science News intern — and Marcia was pretty much everything I wanted to be when I grew up — I’d decided to brave the gig.
Though he retired shortly after I arrived, former Science News editor in chief Tom Siegfried still occasionally appeared in the office during my internship. A few times, he edited my stories. During those edits and over lunch breaks, Tom proved to be a font of advice for the trainee science writer: Carry a notebook everywhere. Don’t overstuff a sentence with too many ideas. Don’t start stories with a question; it is a journalist’s job to tell readers something, not the other way around.
That advice served me well as an intern and later as a Science News staff reporter — although I did recently break the no-questions rule to make a fart joke. (Sorry, Tom.) And when I started researching the origins of Science News for my history of the magazine, I discovered that the publication has served as a training ground for science journalists from the very start.
![a photo of Maria Temming at her desk working. She is wearing a fuzzy plaid sweater, her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she is looking intently at her computer monitor. On her desk are a computer monitor, computer, phone, laptop, headphones, a book about graphene and a cute stuffed hedgehog.](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/032622_mt_bootcamp_inline.jpg?resize=680%2C437&ssl=1)
When Edwin Slosson took charge of Science Service in 1921, science journalism was still a nascent field. So Slosson found himself editing a lot of newbie science writers. He, like Tom, “also dispensed advice, liberally, like salt over a bowl of popcorn,” according to historian Marcel LaFollette. In 1950, Science News Letter posthumously published some of Slosson’s science writing maxims.
A few of Slosson’s tips were about hooking readers. A writer should always imagine, he said, “that your reader is interrupting you every ten lines to ask, ‘Why?’ ‘What for?’ or ‘Well, what of it?’” When it came to untangling complex scientific concepts, Slosson warned, “don’t overestimate the reader’s knowledge and don’t underestimate the reader’s intelligence.”