‘As beat writers know, it’s in doing these routine stories that they sniff out situations worthy of deeper digging.’

It was on a hunch that Marcus Stern, a reporter in the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Copley News Service, launched the investigation that brought down California Congressman Randy “Duke”…

‘… it would be a terrific investment of reportorial resources, not to mention a valuable public service, to dedicate an entire beat to secrecy.’

‘… the hardest part of my job often isn’t getting people to talk. It’s sifting through the streaming fire hose of news to figure out which stories truly warrant more…

‘While I can’t figure out who is paying a lot of these science reporters, the quantity of what they produce does not seem to have fallen off nearly as much…

RELATED ARTICLES“The Science Beat: Riding a Wave, Going Somewhere”– Charles Petit“Guardian Blogger Spoofs Science Journalism– Jonathan SeitzEarly this fall The Guardian took an innovative approach to expanding its coverage of…

RELATED ARTICLES“The Science Beat: Riding a Wave, Going Somewhere”– Charles Petit“The Guardian Brings Scientists as Journalists Into the Mix”– Jonathan SeitzPrompted by dismay at the dearth…

‘While the science beat is old—dating back to even before Sputnik—the approach we take is new. ’

‘If we tell them well, it won’t matter what medium we use. They can be our saving grace.’

After Diana K. Sugg had been The (Baltimore) Sun’s medical reporter for six years, she wrote an enduring article about beat reporting for the Poynter Institute. In “Turn the Beat…