Yale e360: NIF story goes on Reuters as a non-profit outlet’s profile rises
A week ago, in a snit, The Tracker posted on a long, narrowly flawed but substantial article at the non-profit, foundation and donor-financed Yale e360 operation in New Haven. The outlet publishes a steady stream of serious environmental journalism stories. This one was about the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA. It focussed entirely, like a laser, on hopes it may lead the world to a fusion energy Valhalla. It did not mention its prime justification is to give nuclear weapons designers a way to understand the physics and materials properties of H-bombs without lighting one off. This story is one of many in recent years: a significant portion of reporters who have written on NIF have done so with the same blind spot. It pushed a button at tracker central.
What’s new is that this morning I noticed a fusion story on the Reuters service. I then noticed it is the very one, with full credit and link, that e360 published. A check with executive editor Roger Cohn at the service’s home, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, confirmed that this is entirely on the up and up, done with permission.
My criticism of this story’s omission on NIF’s history quite aside, one thus finds a welcome sign that Yale’s flyer at running a non-profit, long form, serious journalism (plus essays and such from non-journalists) site is paying off. That is, except for the paying off part. It charges nothing for its articles, but demands permission and credit. Several well-known science and environmental writers sell articles to it regularly, so somebody gets revenue. It gets millions of visits to its website per month. Last year it won a National Magazine Award for digital media and a Best Specialty Site award from the Online News Association. In the UK, the Guardian newspaper has a formal agreement to use e360′s stuff frequently as part of its Guardian Environment Network. Right now the Guardian is drawing attention to a piece from e360 and by Dave Levitan on the ability of lots of electric cars that plug into the grid to charge up to also be an important buffering and load management tool for electric companies. Such cars could occasionally receive a signal to slosh some of the juice back the other way in return for an electrical bill deduction. Who knows, maybe car owners will open the garage some day and see a message on their chargers’ vid. displays: “Thank You for Helping Prevent a Blackout! Please wait an hour or walk, bike, thumb, call a cab. Your car is for now dead.”
Much of the problem with traditional mass media is that it has given its stuff away free on the web, a business plan that works well only for non-profits with donated money behind them. And that describes e360. Good fortune.
While we’re at it… Other Recent NIF News;
- NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Superlaser fires a blank ; Full context, and mainly about fusion which is much more interesting, not to mention not-secret, than is stockpile stewardship. No blinders here: Reich updates readers on continuing reasons why some critics doubt that NIF will ever work as advertised. Target date for ignition, it says here, is now 2012. It has moved back several times as workers be sure they don’t cook the hardware when they go for full power with live ammo – a hohlraum and fuel pellet fully loaded with fusion-ready hydrogen isotopes.
- ScienceInsider – Daniel Clery : Superlaser Begins Key Experiments ;
- Wired Science – Dave Mosher: World’s Most Powerful Laser on Target for Awesome Science ; Good story, and link to a neat-o video report from Alexis Madrigal to match. Both blog-story and video provide NIF’s political provenance as an important aside, and both are rather boosterish but accurate enough reports on how this monster machine might do its stuff. For hardware-as-eye-candy devotees, NIF is bliss. In the video, the machine’s polished boss, Ed Moses, says the target hohlraum is about the size of a Tylenol capsule. Nice analogy. Doesn’t say whether this onefixes his headaches or causes them.
- Charlie Petit
