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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