The Open Notebook, a non-profit organization focused on providing tools and resources to help science, environmental, and health journalists at all experience levels to sharpen their skills, is receiving applications from science journalists all around the world for its 2023 early career fellowship.
The programme offers fellows the opportunity to explore their career interests and passions and to sharpen their skills as part of a talented, supportive, diverse community of past and present fellows and mentors.
Each fellow is required to pitch, report, and write five articles for publication at The Open Notebook—a mix of “story behind the story” interviews and reported features. The articles would go through several rounds of editing and as each article nears completion, fellows are responsible for fact-checking their articles using TON’s fact-checking guidelines and for collecting demographic data about their sources in order to track the diversity of the fellowships’ sources.
The fellowship involves meetings with a mentor who is an experienced science journalist to help fellows shape story ideas, provide reporting and writing guidance, edit fellows’ article drafts, and offer general craft and career-development advice and guidance.
The fellowship is open to early-career science journalists with less than two years of regular professional science writing experience. Internships and student work do not count toward this requirement and in cases where an applicant has more than two years of professional science writing experience and some or all of that experience is not in English, there are exceptions.
Also, graduate students in the sciences who are interested in science journalism are eligible however, they are to undergo some training and/or experience in writing for the general public. Finally, international applications including writing samples and letters of recommendation must be in English.
The 10 months Fellowship is supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and usually lasts from January 30 to November 30. It is totally remote and flexible with a stipend of $5,500.
Submission of applications closes October 31, 2022 (11:59 p.m. U.S. Central Time) and selections will be announced in December.
For further details, please go to https://www.theopennotebook.com/early-career-fellowship-program/. and to apply, visit https://theopennotebook.submittable.com/submit/55fe6dd8-79eb-44b3-9a0b-4f4c8eb37325/ton-bwf-early-career-fellowship-2022.