Reporting awards for science, engineering & medicine

Prizes totaling $20,000 are available for excellent reporting in science, engineering, and medicine. Categories include: Book; Magazine/Newspaper; Film/Radio/TV; and Online.

Nomination deadline is April 14. For more info and to apply, click here to visit the website for the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

New health news service hiring journalists

If you're looking for a reporting job covering health and medicine, you might want to send a resume to Kaiser Family Foundation, which is launching a news service covering health policy.

"Over the next several months, a team of full-time journalists will be hired and top freelance journalists will be recruited to write stories and series for distribution" through Kaiser Health News, according to the news release.

The news service will be headquartered in Washington, D.C., and overseen by top journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Congressional Quarterly.

All news content will be available for free on a new website, www.kaiserhealthnews.org, expected to go live in early 2009. KHN will also partner with news organizations to jointly produce and publish articles, and will provide free content for syndication to news organizations in the U.S. and around the world.

"The goal of the new effort is to provide in-depth coverage and news at a time when cash-strapped news organizations are being forced to scale back their efforts in this crucial area," the news release says.

-Mark Grabowski

Medical evidence boot camp for journalists

To help journalists who cover health and medicine, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program will offer an intensive course on how to evaluate medical evidence, Dec. 1-5.

"Medical researchers from MIT, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, the NIH, the FDA and other institutions will teach the course. They’ll explain how clinical trials are designed and carried out and why some kinds of studies are more credible than others. We’ll explore the politics and ethics of how new drugs are tested, often by the companies that stand to profit from them."

The 12 journalists selected will receive $500 for travel expenses to Cambridge, a hotel room and meals. Applicants must have at least five years experience. Apply by September 15.