Tuesday, August 17, 2010

First days


When I walked into the news room at The Times I almost blurted out how like The Wire it looked.  It must be the real thing - it looks like it does on the telly.  A massive room jam packed with desks, computers and people.  Overflowing with books and reports and general paper detritus.  Miles to the nearest window.  Men outweigh women by about 5:1. 

The Health Editor is on holiday so I have his desk for the next few weeks.  Lots of people seem to be on holiday, which means that the daily science team is currently made up of me, a health correspondent and the science editor.  The science editor reports to the news editor.  Upstairs there is, allegedly, another team working on the monthly science pull-out, Eureka.  But I haven't met them yet so can't confirm this.

So far, I've written a few posts for the science blog and written a story for the print edition on an evolutionary biology paper exploring the effect on brothers on female sexual maturation.  Well, I wrote a draft of a story on the paper.  Then the science editor showed me how he might revise it before filing it.  He was very complementary about my first try.  But really I think he wrote more of it than I did....  He said almost exactly the same thing as I say to so many students: the ideas are good, it's just not expressed very well.  Maybe it'll get into tomorrow's paper, maybe it wont. 

Today's learning points: short sentences; a new paragraph for each new idea; simple; cut to the chase.  I thought I knew all that.  Must keep practicing.

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