Type of site | data magazine |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Founder(s) | Deborah Blum and Tom Zeller Jr. |
Industry | Media |
URL | www |
Commercial | No |
Launched | March 2016 |
Undark Magazine is a nonprofit online publication exploring science as a "frequently wondrous, sometimes contentious, and occasionally troubling byproduct of human culture." [1] The name Undark is a deliberate reference [2] to a radium-based luminous paint product called Undark that ultimately proved toxic, if not deadly for those who handled it. [3] [4]
The publication's tag line is "Truth, Beauty, Science." [5] [6]
The magazine is published under the auspices of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [7]
Undark publishes a mix of long-form journalism, shorter features, essays, op-eds, questions and answers, and book excerpts and reviews. All content is freely available to read, and most is available for republishing by other publications and websites. [8] [9] Many large national and international publications, including Scientific American , [10] The Atlantic , [11] Smithsonian , [12] NPR, [13] and Outside [14] have republishing relationships with Undark.
Undark was jointly founded in 2016 by Pulitzer Prize-winning science author Deborah Blum and former New York Times journalist Tom Zeller Jr., who serves as editor-in-chief of the magazine. [15] [16] [17]
Undark has earned numerous awards for its journalism, including being named a finalist for a 2022 National Magazine Award in the Reporting category. [18]
On February 19, 2019, Undark was awarded a George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting. The award honored photojournalist Larry C. Price and contributing reporters for the magazine's multinational, multipart exposé on global air pollution, called "Breathtaking". [19] [20] The series also won the 2019 Al Neuharth Innovation in Investigative Journalism Award from the Online News Association. [21]
The magazine's work has been anthologized in The Best American Science & Nature Writing book series. [22]
In 2017, Undark was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award in the Feature category for its series "Wear & Tear", [23] which explored the global impacts of the leather tanning and textile industries. [24] In 2018, three Undark contributors were named as finalists in the National Association of Science Writers' Science and Society Awards. [25]
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism is the primary journalism institution at Harvard University.
The Nieman Fellowship is a fellowship from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. It awards multiple types of fellowships.
Deborah Blum is an American science journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) and The Poison Squad (2018), and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger, via her blog titled Elemental, for Wired.
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. From 1999 to 2008, Newitz wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000 to 2004 was the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004, Newitz became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded Other magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015, Newitz was editor-in-chief of Gawker-owned media venture io9, and subsequently its direct descendant Gizmodo, Gawker's design and technology blog. They have written for the periodicals Popular Science, Film Quarterly and Wired. As of 2019, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.
Daily Maverick is a South African online news publication and weekly print newspaper, with offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It claims to have a readership of approximately 10 million readers per month. It was founded in 2009 by Branislav Brkic, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of the publication, and Styli Charalambous, its Chief Executive Officer.
The Knight Science Journalism program offers 9-month research fellowships, based at its headquarters at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, to elite staff and freelance journalists specializing in coverage of science and technology, medicine, or the environment. Fellows are chosen from an international application pool in a competitive process each spring, and reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for two semesters of audited coursework and research at MIT, Harvard, and surrounding institutions.
Glenn Frankel is an American author and academic, journalist and winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He spent 27 years with The Washington Post, where he was bureau chief in Richmond (Va.), Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London, and editor of The Washington PostMagazine. He served as a visiting journalism professor at Stanford University and as Director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of five books, his latest works explore the making of an iconic American movie in the context of the historical era it reflects. In 2018 Frankel was named a Motion Picture Academy Film Scholar. He was named a 2021-2 research fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York for a book about Beatles manager Brian Epstein.
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book that exemplifies, "literary grace, a commitment to serious research and social concern." The prize is given by the Nieman Foundation and by the Columbia University School of Journalism.
Tony Bartelme, an American journalist and author, is the senior projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. He has been a finalist for four Pulitzer Prizes.
Thomas Zeller Jr. is an American journalist who has covered poverty, technology, energy policy and the environment, among other topics, for a variety of publications, including 12 years on staff as a writer and editor at The New York Times. He has also held staff positions at National Geographic Magazine and The Huffington Post.
Sabah Hamamou is an Egyptian journalist, the acting head of business section at Al-Ahram
The Conversation is a network of nonprofit media outlets publishing news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis. Articles are written by academics and researchers under a Creative Commons license, allowing reuse without modification. Copyright terms for images are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. Its model has been described as explanatory journalism. Except in "exceptional circumstances", it only publishes articles by "academics employed by, or otherwise formally connected to, accredited institutions, including universities and accredited research bodies".
The Mirror Awards are annual journalism awards recognizing the work of writers, reporters, editors and organizations who cover the media industry. The awards were established by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2006.
The Knight-Wallace Fellowship is an award given to accomplished journalists at the University of Michigan. Knight-Wallace Fellowships are awarded to reporters, editors, photographers, producers, editorial writers and cartoonists, with at least five years of full-time, professional experience in the news media.
Paige Williams is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Williams held a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and her work has won a National Magazine Award for feature writing. She has served as editor of Nieman Storyboard and has taught classes in narrative writing for the Nieman Foundation.
Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent online publication of the Simons Foundation covering developments in physics, mathematics, biology and computer science.
Gaiutra Bahadur is a Guyanese-American writer. She is best known for Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2014.
Jo Chandler is an Australian journalist, science writer and educator. Her journalism has covered a wide range of subject areas, including science, the environment, women's and children's issues, and included assignments in Africa, the Australian outback, Antarctica, Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism and Honorary Fellow Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
Rose Eveleth is an American podcast host, producer, designer, and animator. They helped launch and are a producer of ESPN Films' 30 for 30 podcast series, which was a Grand Award Gold Radio Winner in the narrative/documentary at the 2019 New York Festivals Radio Awards, as well as a Bronze Radio Winner in the sports category. 30 for 30 was also nominated for the 2018 Webby Awards in the features and best series categories. Since 2015, Eveleth has become known for their Flash Forward podcast, receiving an MJ Bear Fellowship in 2016.
The Open Notebook(TON) is a science journalism non-profit organization, online magazine, and publisher. Its purpose is to help science journalists improve their skills. It publishes articles and interviews on the craft of science writing and maintains a database of successful pitch letters to editors. TON also runs a paid fellowship program for early-career science journalists. The Open Notebook is supported by foundation grants and individual donations, and also partners with journalism and science communication organizations.