The recent ripple of non profit news outlets stepping in to the void left by recently faltering mainstream media around the country is not ignoring the science beat. One of them is MinnPost.com, its aim to “provide high-quality journalism for news-intense people who care about Minnesota,” which has beefed up its science coverage with a name or two familiar in the business.

This week co-managing editor Roger Buoen – formerly of the now defunct Minneapolis Star, and then the Tribune and eventually the Star-Tribune – wrote MinnPost adds science news feature. The  science writer to be providing regular reports is former Star Tribune staffer Sharon Schmickle with, one hopes, more such contributors to come. The outlet also, it says here, will be featuring articles from the DC-based Inside Science News Service.  The latter is an operation of the Amer. Institute of Physics and, one infers, may have had an inside line on this client. Its editor is Jim Dawson , a former Minneapolis Star Tribune science writer and editor. The service’s offering at MinnPost right now is Computer model developed – for calling football plays. It even has a reference to the game-theory mathematical construct called the Nash equilibrium.

Schmickle, one notes (and Tracker didn’t know about here or this before sitting down to do this post!) is a former MIT Knight Journalism Fellow at the program sponsoring this site you’re reading right now. One further discovers the Knight Foundation that provided most of the MIT program’s endowment also pungled up a good piece of money to give MinnPost a kick start.

Buoen smartly provides in his announcement a link to Schmickle’s first offering under the pub’s new daily feature, called Scientific Agenda. This one has the hed Chasing the sun: U of M enters energy decathlon , an account of the difficulties a local team had in making a solar home that manages to heat and run itself even through the long, dim winters of the northern midwest. She also, one learns after a quick search, has been there awhile. Previous stories include in July last year a longer piece: The Next Big Stem Fight: Mixing Cow and Human DNA and, more recently, Why detecting nothing is really something in gravitational wave project. The two pieces suggest her comfort across a wide stretch of the science beat.

We’ll be looking for more now. The pub has an rss feed, just added to the ksjtracker’s list. Good fortune, MinnPost.

Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.