Here's What's Next in Our Newsroom Fellow Hiring Process
Dear reader,
I owe it to you to give an update on where we’re at in our newsroom fellow hiring process. Since this is our first hire we want to make sure we do it right by you. But get this: after meeting with our ten shortlisted applicants, I can confidently say that there is no going wrong here.
Our applicants bring a diversity of personalities, lived experiences, and skills to our newsroom: from rural reporting to essay writing, and audio production to managing their own newsdesks, these folks are highly qualified and motivated. They will easily exceed any expectations that we put on them.
One question our applicants like to ask is to have me explain to them our newsroom culture. The way I explain it is that The Xylom does not make our contributors chase after clicks, outrage, or quotas, instead, we ask them to focus on accountability, impact, and solutions, by taking care of the stories we cover with accuracy, depth, and nuance. An applicant quipped after my response that our interview made them "the most optimistic about science writing since forever."
Offering a clear, alternative vision of science journalism, and inviting everyone to be part of it is perhaps why a whopping thirty-five people applied to this part-time position, and also perhaps why we are steadily and sustainably sprouting as a newsroom. Case in point: we are moving our newsletter to Buttondown because we have grown out of the Mailchimp free tier subscriber limit! (Tell us whether you like the new look by replying to this email.)
The Advisory Board met recently to select a handful of finalists to meet with the full Board this upcoming week. If all goes well, I hope to introduce our Fellow to y’all in mid-August. One of every three dollars you donate will go directly to our Newsroom Fellow; the remainder will support our operations (such as paying for our new newsletter software) and our freelance contributors! You will also get cool swag delivered to your doorstep; let’s give ourselves a little hope today. We deserve it.
Best regards,
Alex Ip
Editor-in-Chief
I HAVE TEN-ISH WORDS TO SAY, THANKS
FAMILY NEWS
- Saren Seeley is on the Story Collider podcast this week! The episode's theme is "overthinking". Go check it out:
- Congrats to Saugat Bolakhe, who is part of Quanta Magazine's first story that is written by an intern, illustrated by an intern, and promoted on social media by an intern.
- Our Advisory Board member Betsy Ladyzhets is one of the sources for an article from The Open Notebook about, you guessed it, “Journalist Becomes Source: What to Do When the Press Comes Calling”.
TODAY IN THINGS YOU MUST READ
A SOUTHERN FLAIR
- Today, Dalton, Georgia is less known for its commercial prowess than for the far-right former CrossFit instructor who represents the area in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene. But it’s also playing host to an early test of the Biden administration’s national experiment in industrial policy. The American Prospect’s Luke Goldstein was eager to find out how residents, industrialists, and politicians are navigating the town’s transition from carpetmaking to solar panel manufacturing.
- This week in Texas, brought to you by our friends at The Texas Tribune: The Texas Water Development Board is developing the first statewide flood plan as a response to Hurricane Harvey. More than 2.4 million Texans live in areas that have a 1% chance of flooding each year, known as the 100-year floodplain, an area that consists one-fifth of the state’s land; another 3.5 million people live in areas with a 0.2% chance of flooding each year, known as the 500-year floodplain.
- AL.com reports that The U.S. EPA has proposed a formal rejection of Alabama’s state coal ash plan, saying the state’s plan does not do enough to protect rivers and drinking water from toxins. If the EPA proposal is finalized, utilities in Alabama may be forced to excavate and remove millions of tons of wet coal ash slurry from unlined ponds alongside rivers in Alabama.
- Louisiana has passed House Bill 272, which mandates private health insurance reimburse doula services up to $1,500, with bipartisan support. A "non-medical physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual support person that provides education advocacy to families who are in the preconception, all the way to postpartum", doulas bring benefits that directly address the maternal health crisis disproportionately affecting Black women. Verite News looks at the impacts of the legislation.
WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING
- Barbie? Oppenheimer? (We say, “yes”.) For the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephanie M. Lee spoke to real researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory, founded by the titular character of the latter and central to the development of the first atomic bomb, who leaped at the opportunity to become extras for the movie.
- For a weekend, Boston's City Hall Plaza is home to the most popular children's playground in North America, after a video of a Boston police officer catapulting out of a children’s slide went viral. HuffPost talks to Rhett Allain, an associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and the author of “The Physics of Going Fast—but Not Too Fast—on a Giant Slide,” to learn more about what went wrong.
- While Asian Americans are overrepresented in medicine, they are heavily underrepresented in leadership positions. Why is that? STAT has the numbers.
- This is something we're not reading: Former Arkansas Governor (and father of current Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders) Mick Huckabee has published “The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change,” which contains plenty of climate disinformation. Inside Climate News's Keerti Gopal looks at why this new strain of climate skepticism, which doesn’t deny that the planet is warming but instead suggests it’s been overblown by scientists, politicians, and mainstream media, is particularly dangerous.
THE XYLOM'S RECENT STORIES
In the Shadow of Mumbai’s Coastal Road, Fishermen Ponder Their Future — If Any
- Mumbai's Coastal Road, a $1.5B superhighway built on reclaimed land along the Arabian Coast, is set to open next year. Kang-Chun Cheng heads to Lotus Jetty to see how the megaproject has devastated Indigenous Koli fishers — and how they are fighting back.
Hyena Helpers for Human-predator Harmony
- For Pride Month, Navya Pothamsetty spoke to Christine Wilkinson, Ph.D. about her work: why humans run into conflict with hyenas and coyotes, how lived experiences and values shape these interactions, and what we can do to live with mesopredators in harmony.
Toxic Nuclear Waste is Piling up in the U.S. Where’s the Deposit?
- Decades on end and after spending billions, the U.S. still has no strategy to permanently deposit its highly radioactive nuclear waste, writes Bárbara Pinho.