What’s new?

I’m proud to announce that on Feb. 28, C&EN launched a new podcast, which is aptly called Stereo Chemistry. It will feature C&EN reporters as well as the chemists making the news. We invite you to enjoy it from your desktop, any kind of smart mobile device, or even your Amazon Alexa or other voice assistant. To make sure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe now on iTunes, Google Play, or TuneIn. You can also find episodes on cen.acs.org.

Although moving forward Stereo Chemistry’s frequency will be monthly, we’re publishing some special bonus episodes to celebrate the launch. The first one was released the last day of February, and it highlights the work of many chemists working in the field of metal-organic frameworks who agreed to sit down with C&EN’s Matt Davenport to tell us why these materials are so hot right now. One such chemist is Omar Yaghi, who recently shared the prestigious 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Makoto Fujita and spoke with us from Saudi Arabia.

The podcast will allow us to connect with readers in a way that other forms of media cannot. We hope to convince you to listen to our journalism not only while you drive to and from work or while you are at the gym, but also while you are taking your dog for a walk, doing the dishes, or cooking dinner. Podcasts provide an intimate experience and accompany you wherever you are. We want to be there with you.

We hope Stereo Chemistry will entertain, educate, inform, and inspire our listeners while also offering some laughs and “Aha!” moments. Podcasts feature real voices that will add new dimensions to our storytelling. Voices with inflections, emotions, and emphasis. Voices with accents from all over the world.

We hope the podcast will allow us to connect the story creators at C&EN with you, our readers. We generate a lot of material that often does not make it into the stories we publish. Those anecdotes, opinions, and war stories that we find captivating will now have an outlet.

We’ll also be featuring your voices. Each episode will also highlight people from across the chemistry community telling their own stories in their own words.

We are already working on the next episodes, which will cover issues such as sexual harassment in the sciences and preprint repositories. We’d like you to suggest topics you’d like to hear about. You can do that by emailing cen_multimedia@acs.org.

Another initiative we just introduced is C&EN Methods. Over the past couple of years, we have been implementing many changes to the way we create, produce, and distribute C&EN: from enhancements to how we produce our content, to the underlying platforms that we use to publish our content on a daily basis, to the ongoing evolution of our journalism. And there is more to come. With, among other developments, a new website coming up before the end of May and personalization features also in the works, we want to make sure we tell you how and why we do these things.

C&EN Methods is a newsroom-led blog that will give readers a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes at C&EN. When we launch something new, update something old, win an award for our journalism, or experiment with design and storytelling, we will tell you and others how we did it. To find out more, check out cenm.ag/methods.

Finally, I’d like to remind you that nominations for the 2018 class of C&EN’s Talented 12 are due April 8. If you know of any exceptional young chemists, this is your chance to recognize their talent, vision, and potential. Go to talented12.cenmag.org/nominate and submit your entry.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.