Looking back, and looking ahead to 2024
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and journalist Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
For those of us living on Earth’s northern hemisphere, we just made it through the longest night of the year. It can only get brighter from here.
This has been tough year for the journalism industry. We’ve just seen widespread layoffs at WIRED, New Yorker and other Conde Nast magazines, as well as at Vox Media outlets like The Verge and New York Magazine. WIRED isn’t the only magazine to lose experienced science, health and climate journalists: others include CNBC, Popular Science, FiveThirtyEight, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic. It’s the job of journalists to hold people in power accountable for their actions, and it’s time to hold media companies’ business executives accountable, too.
I suppose there’s a silver lining, according to Michael Greshko (formerly at Nat Geo): Some laid off journalists have gone on to form or join new publications like Defector and 404 Media. (And on that note, I recommend this new Defector article about de-extinction by Sabrina Imbler.) Media outlets come and go, shrink and grow, but many talented journalists are continuing to produce excellent work. For readers, it just means looking to a wider variety of places for stories and information.
Throughout my work, I’ve often attempted to weave in ethical questions and put today’s developments in broader, historical contexts. I strive to not just entertain and inform readers but to stimulate conversations and aid readers as they develop their own opinions. That includes my work for WIRED on the Russia-Ukraine war, on SpaceX and other space companies, my piece connecting Star Trek and NASA, and my interviews with space ethicists. Before I came to WIRED, I wrote a mini-opus for Aeon magazine about efforts to decolonize space exploration.
It’s not just space. I’ve sought to do the same in more Earth-focused pieces too. These include my reporting and writing about algorithms being adopted by the US criminal justice system (Undark magazine), impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement (Knowable magazine), invasive searches of devices at the US-Mexico border (OneZero magazine), new iterations of scientific racism (Smithsonian magazine), and failed nuclear policies (Undark again).
Stay tuned for more next year. Happy holidays!
More about me: I’m a science writer and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.