Blum worked as a reporter covering police, fires, courts, and other general assignment beats for newspapers in Georgia, Florida and California before she turned to
science writing. She was on the staffs of the
Macon Telegraph, the
St. Petersburg Times and the
Fresno Bee, among other publications.
Environmental journalism After earning a master's degree in
environmental journalism from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Blum returned to the
Fresno Bee, where she became an award-winning environmental reporter. She was the first to report on the alarming incidence of severely deformed
waterfowl at the
Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, where poor management of
irrigation runoff had polluted the
wetland with toxic levels of the element
selenium. Her work for the
Fresno Bee put the mid-sized paper ahead of much larger regional rivals, including the
San Francisco Chronicle and the
Los Angeles Times in covering that major environmental story.
Science writing and teaching In 1984, Blum joined the staff of the
Fresno Bee's sister newspaper, the
Sacramento Bee, where she broadened her range, covering science subjects. Her series "California: The Weapons Master" was awarded the 1987
Livingston Award for National Reporting. In 1992 the
American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded her its AAAS-Westinghouse Award for Science Journalism, also for the "Monkey Wars" series. Blum expanded the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper series into a book of the same title. Her second book,
Sex on the Brain examines the biological differences between men and women. In
Love at Goon Park, she explores the life and career of groundbreaking psychology researcher
Harry Harlow, and in
Ghost Hunters she follows a quest by 19th century psychologist-philosopher
William James and colleagues to apply objective scientific methods to the study of paranormal phenomena. In ''The Poisoner's Handbook'' she explores the pioneering work of two unheralded scientists who paved the way for modern forensic detectives. This book was promoted on
Point of Inquiry. She received the
James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public from the
American Chemical Society in 2015 for this book. Blum has written, most often about science and its interrelationship with American culture, for publications that have included
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Boston Globe,
Time,
The Washington Post, the
Los Angeles Times,
Discover,
Psychology Today,
Rolling Stone, the
Utne Reader, and
Mother Jones. In 2013, she began writing "Poison Pen" which appears as a column in
The New York Times and as a blog post in the newspaper's online edition. website. After becoming director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, she created and became publisher of a new on-line science magazine,
Undark. From 1997 until 2015, she was a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2005 she was appointed Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism, an endowed faculty position within the University of Wisconsin journalism school. In July 2015, she became director of Knight Science Journalism at MIT. A past president of the
National Association of Science Writers, she has been a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers and has also served on such panels for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, the AAAS Committee on Public Understanding of Science and Technology, the National Research Council's Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, the
Society for Science & the Public and a US Congress committee on science. Blum is co-editor, with Mary Knudson and Robin Marantz Henig, of the book
A Field Guide for Science Writers.
Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT Blum became director of the
Knight Science Journalism Program (KSJ), a fellowship program endowed by the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation to encourage "a select breed of journalist", in July 2015. The following year, she and former New York Times reporter and columnist
Tom Zeller Jr. co-founded
Undark, a digital science magazine published under the auspices of the KSJ program. In July 2016, David Corcoran, former editor of
Science Times at
The New York Times, joined the program as a senior editor at the magazine and associate director of the program. == Personal life ==