I completed my reporting internship with Nature near the end of June. My final work on staff there included recording a news chat for the weekly podcast about the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project I mentioned in my last post. I also discussed an ancient bone flute found in Germany. You can download the newschat here [mp3, 7:05], or the entire podcast from Nature. For the following week’s podcast I interviewed Elly Tanaka about her work on how salamanders regenerate lost limbs. Listen to my interview here [mp3, 6:15], get the whole podcast, or read the news story I wrote about it.

I also wrote a blog post about how an academic publisher offered its authors and pretty much anyone else willing to to post favorable reviews on websites gift certificates worth $25. Not too lucrative, but it must have attracted some people before an indignant academic blew the whistle.

Finally, I filed a feature story a while back but will be finishing it up on a freelance basis, and will post about it separately whenever it appears in Nature. So in some ways the 3-month internship is not over. I’ll be completing the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project and my feature alongside my other freelance work. Still, now’s a good time to reflect on it: the internship was a great chance to see the inside of a media organization, to work closely with great journalists, and to learn new tricks to take my journalism career to the next level.  Freelancing 2.0? Could be.