OPEN

I mentioned Charles Arthur in my last column, and it reminded me to include a link to a post he wrote last week called You want to write for The Guardian’s Technology section? Could I suggest… (pt 1).

Well worth a read by PRs. Mr Arthur is hungry for good technology stories that don’t necessarily involve computers:

There’s much to be written beyond computers, so it seems odd that I’m
having to chase so hard after ideas and try to marry them to people.
Perhaps it’s just that “technology” in the wider sense has been allowed
to wither by Fleet Street; but the Guardian’s Life section (as it was)
gained plenty of notice for many of the science-generated stories it
ran, even though quite a few of those could be defined as technology.
Dolly the sheep, after all, could be narrowly defined as science, but
the growth of cloning to extend to herds is technology: practical
application of knowledge. The challenge then is to find interesting
things to ask and write about it. (See (1) above.) Stem cells, though,
are still a laboratory exploit; so I’d say those don’t make the cut.
But what about the technologies involved in making better golf clubs?
Or cleaning up New Orleans’s toxic waste problem? Or carbon
sequestration? They’re all interesting, if written right.

Thinking caps, on chaps…