Betsy Mason

Betsy Mason is a freelance science journalist who lives in California and covers everything from earthquakes to brains. She especially likes writing stories about maps or animals. She is the co-author of a book of stories about maps and cartography called All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey. Some of her favorite animals to write about are ones that are often ignored, disliked or underestimated, such as raccoons and spiders.  

Betsy previously worked as a science reporter for the Contra Costa Times newspaper and a science editor for WIRED magazine. She was a 2015–2016 Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Betsy has a master's degree in geology from Stanford University and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. 

All Stories by Betsy Mason

  1. Animals

    News stories about spiders are unfairly negative

    Nearly half of news stories about people-spider encounters contain errors, according to a new study. And those falsehoods tend to have a negative spin.

  2. Animals

    See the world through a jumping spider’s eyes — and other senses

    Scientists are teasing out the many ways the spiders’ vision, listening and taste senses differ from ours