Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

About a half-dozen years ago I attended a conference on science journalism in Hanover. A foundation had assembled a bunch of university types and magazine editors to discuss a new curriculum for teaching science journalism at German universities.

Among the presenters was a German professor who laid out the case for establishing quote banks and description depots.  The idea was to warehouse thoroughly vetted quotes, descriptions and other elements of science journalism. Then journalists could select from these stockpiles the prefab parts needed to assemble entire news stories.

These parts could be reused in different configurations and to varying degrees, helping journalists create different stories from the same stockpile. The proponent argued that this was good for credibility. All of the material would be pre-approved for accuracy.

Many of us - well, at least many of the Americans - looked at each other in horror. I distinctly recall one of them leaning over and whispering, “That’s exactly how I teach my students not to write.”

I believed then, or at least chose to believe then, that this could never come to pass. But check out this story in the New York Times regarding the rise and fall of the media. It refers to the development of algorithms that assemble facts into narratives without the benefit of writers. Not only are the parts prefab, in this scenario robots replace workers on the assembly line.

Fine journalism crafted by real writers may not go away. But I am troubled by this sentence in the Times story: “The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism, but on the Web, pretty good — or even not terrible — is often good enough.”

Where does that leave journalists? Well, I guess we’ll always need parts manufacturers. But I sure hate to think that fine journalism ends up with the same fate as handcrafted automobiles - rare and expensive to produce.

I find hope at the end of the very same news story. It is here where reporter David Carr makes the case that young writers come to New York armed with ideas, energy and technology, and to bust down doors to a new brand of journalism.  That’s exciting.

But perhaps the true hope lies in Carr’s final sentence:

For them, New York is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.

I’d like to see the robot that can craft an ending like that.

Errr…actually not.

By David Poulson

National Geographic recently asked all 100 U.S. senators to sketch their states from memory and identify at least three important places on their maps.

Some of the pols produced impressive work. Sen. Al Franken has a nicely drawn map of Minnesota with detailed annotations. In fact, Franken is a bit of a cartographic showoff. Check out this video of Franken drawing an entire map of the United States at the Minnesota State Fair.

Of course, if this was a contest it would be unfair. Some senators had much easier assignments. It doesn’t seem like Sen. Michael Enzi would have much trouble drawing the boxlike outline of Wyoming.

And I don’t mean to come across as the mapping police, but some senators not blessed with a state with regular borders appeared to have a little help. I’m suspicious that Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins may have a carefully traced submission.  But perhaps I’m overly cynical. You be the judge: Go to the National Geographic site and click on the states of the senators who participated.

And perhaps that’s the map that is the most interesting aspect of this story. It appears that senators representing only 11 states contributed. I suppose that might be chalked up to busy schedules rather than geographic ignorance.

Still, if I was an environmental reporter, I’d give a quick call to my own senators and ask why they couldn’t have sketched Michigan’s mitten and its Upper Peninsula. Connect the two with the world famous Mackinac Bridge and identify any two of the four lakes - they’re all among the world’s largest - that border it and you’ve completed an assignment that I would hope that most of the state’s schoolchildren could do.

Geography is critical to the environmental reporter. You need to know what makes your region special. You need at least a baseline of understanding of what goes where so that you can write about what’s at stake when the environment changes, if not degrades.

The National Geographic story would be a fun one to do locally. Ask officials to sketch the outlines of their domains – say a county or a city. Have them locate important geographic features and natural resources. Publish the result. Regardless of what they produce, you should be able to write about it. It’s a talker, and you may even challenge your readers to do likewise.

But before you do, maybe you should try it yourself. If you’re covering the environment, you need to know your region’s geography. The “where” of a story is an important yet often neglected part of environmental reporting.

You need to know what’s special about the region you cover. Do you?

By David Poulson

I’m a strong advocate of visual storytelling. Giving readers an understanding of the “where” of a story is an underappreciated but especially critical component of environmental writing. How are people supposed to know what’s at stake unless you paint them a picture?

I tried to hit that lesson in class last week by using for an example Jef Mallett. He once was a graphics artist at a news service where I covered the environment. Nowadays Jef draws the nationally syndicated Frazz comic. Perhaps no one understands visual storytelling better than cartoonists who cram a story into three- or four-panel strips. Jef clearly gets this. His characters address complex issues briefly but with a great mix of humor and insight. It’s one of those rare strips that often teach me something.

Jef also writes, bringing his visual talent into that venue as well.  He’s just written a new book called Trizophrenia. I look forward to its release later this week.

But with this post I want to address a short piece Jef wrote that came out of a tour of military hospitals by cartoonists seeking to cheer up the troops last April. It’s not an environmental story.  But it is a masterful example of establishing place with strong, descriptive writing. Jef reports how one of the patients described how he was wounded. I’ve reprinted it below so that you can appreciate it without interruption. What follows is the same piece with my comments.

Here’s the same piece with my comments in bold:

This Navy Corpsman was third man in, with two Marines clearing an abandoned house when a booby-trapped refrigerator blew up and cut them down. He couldn’t get to his feet, didn’t even have both of them anymore. So he dragged himself to the squad leader and applied a tourniquet to what was left of the sergeant’s leg, then gave him orders: I’m going to save the other guy; I need you to keep yelling “I will not die” at the top of your lungs.

As long as he could hear his leader screaming, he knew he was clear to attend to his other squad member. Same touniquet application, same orders to scream. Ah, here’s the answer. Our curiosity is immediately rewarded. How cool is that? He dragged himself back and forth between the two men several times before he took the time to put a tourniquet on his own leg. He remembers cutting open his squad leader’s pant leg and watching a shin roll away like a fireplace log, neatly sheared off at the knee and ankle. Wow! Nothing like a strong simile to put you there. That’s an approach that can backfire. Writers often overreach with similes. The only way I keep from doing so is to test them aloud on someone else.  I think Jef hit just the right note here. So how did he pull it off?

The corpsman did not use that simile, Jef said. He described the injury with a lot more words and hand gestures. But the image of the rolling shin came to mind immediately. It remained just an image until it came to writing it without the luxury of the corpsman’s time and hand gestures. “I guess I had subconciously already done the refining and editing and I just wrote it down,” he said. “It’s pretty gross, isn’t it?”

He remembers being a little surprised at the trail of blood-mud that described his path between the two men. He remembers, just before passing out as he was being hoisted onto the medevac, being able to see the sun shine clearly between two perfectly cauterized holes through his foot. Had he had a better angle, he could have seen the sun shining through most of his lower leg that way.

Another nice set of descriptions with the wonderfully alliterative “blood-mud” which is something quite different than writing that it was a trail of blood and mud. And Jef effectively uses the corpsman’s recollection of the sun shining through his wounds - something he even extends to describe another wound that the guy couldn’t see himself.

A year later, just about all of it spent in the same room on the same floor at Walter Reed, he was showing a bunch of slackjawed cartoonists the scars on that leg. The other leg was gone, and this one was still touch and go. Somebody called him a hero, but he snorted. He just did his job, that’s all. Give the Navy credit for training him so well, he said. But he did allow that he was up for a Silver Star for valor. Someone else snorted. What does it take to get a gold one, for crying out loud?

Stay dead, he said. He had died, for two minutes, but his timing was good. His heart stopped while surgeons were already inside his torso clearing out shrapnel, so it was an easy reach to massage the heart back to silver-star status.

The previous passages are a nice flash forward. We don’t continue the chronology but hint to the reader of a long recovery that occurred during the period we’ve jumped. I particularly enjoy the answer to the question about what you need to do to get a gold star: “Stay dead, he said.” It is short, powerful and alliterative. The only way I would improve it is to set those four words into their own paragraph to give them even more emphasis.

So what was next? This guy seemed capable of anything except what he wanted, which was to return to the fighting and save more Marines. But he would get his nursing degree and return to that same floor at Walter Reed. Nobody knew the floor better than him. Nobody knew what the patients had been through better than he did. Nobody, but nobody, was going to tell him no.

Putting on my subjective news editor hat, I’d probably edit this last paragraph. It’s got a bit too much of the writer in it for my taste. Others are certain to disagree with me.  And it probably works in the context it was intended, which is more of a column than a news report.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

My point is that description done right is a powerful tool. It is jettisoned too often in the pursuit of brevity. And you certainly can go overboard. The trick is to make the best of what you’ve got without going over the top.

And if you want to enjoy some fine writing from Jef in a lighter vein, buy Trizophrenia.

By David Poulson

I like to preach that journalism equals content plus engagement. I tell students that they can write an incredibly important story, but it isn’t journalism unless people - hopefully lots of people - consume it.

Important but boring is not journalism. Something no one reads but the writer is not journalism. That’s more like a diary entry - perhaps helpful to the writer but certainly not journalism.

Social media and other digital tools have given reporters new ways to escape that fate. Over at Great Lakes Echo we’re experimenting with Facebook quizzes. Recently we launched one that assesses which lake best suits your personality. The concept initially appealed to me as the engagement piece of the equation. My hope was that it would drive interest in and traffic to the site where readers could consume the other more serious content that’s already there.

But can a Facebook quiz be a self-contained unit of journalism - one with engagement and content? I asked a class that question recently. The reply: “Can reading the back of a cereal box be considered journalism?”

Maybe.

We just asked readers to help us create a new quiz: Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other? Judging by private e-mails and the comments on the site we’re succeeding with the engagement piece. But just maybe we’re delivering content as well. Check out this comment on that post:

Spotted knapweed – a loner with a toxic personality – sucks the fun and energy out of life (poor palatability for herbivores and takes up all the water in the area, possibly releases a toxin that kills other plants), likes chaos and disorder (colonizes disturbed locations)

We’ll have fun with that and the other suggestions - there is a great one comparing an ex to the Asian carp poised to invade Lake Michigan:

He’s huge, gross-looking, and he frequently pops up when I least expect him too. I wish there was an electric fence to keep him away…

And we will research more ourselves, perhaps serving as a front door to more information that we link to.

It strikes me that at the same time we will be delivering serious content, perhaps raising just a bit the level of awareness readers have about important environmental issues.

I’m not exactly ready to petition the Pulitzer Committee to expand its categories to include Facebook quizzes. But it strikes me that there is something going on here that journalists should be exploring.

By David Poulson

It seems to me that two contrary attitudes sabotage the use of video on the web.

One comes from print reporters reluctant to stretch themselves. They may be spooked by the technology or baffled by a foreign story-telling technique. Either way they’re paralyzed. They don’t try, or they don’t try very hard.

Their opposites are the documentary filmmaker wannabees. Video is a tremendously complicated endeavor for them.  Breaking news? Forget it. These folks need days to edit something that meets high expectations.

It may look nice. But the effort often fails to justify the benefit.

There is a happy medium that cures paralysis while putting this storytelling tool to work fast. Check out the video toward the end of this story.

It’s a scant 26-seconds long. There’s no sound. It was taken with a point and shoot camera. A few sentences in text provide context. It doesn’t divert the reader - it augments the story.

This is a good cure for video paralysis. And while hardly a documentary, the effort to benefit ratio is extremely favorable.

It’s effective. You know how I know?

I itch every time I watch it.

By David Poulson

Last week at Great Lakes Echo we launched a minor experiment.

The Echo Chamber is a standard Q & A interview you might see in a print publication, but with the answers given as short video clips. It gives us a chance to venture more into video while imposing some length limits that I hope overcome the long-windedness that’s a drawback of a lot of the journalism videos.

The idea is to pose no more than five questions and to severely limit the time of response.

The first effort went fine, but limits are tough. We couldn’t resist throwing in a bonus feature of invasive species expert Jeff Alexander reading an excerpt from his book. My reasoning was that readers could always choose to ignore it. But  I think some of the answers went a bit longer than needed.

We’ll see how things shake out. This is hardly a new advance in journalism. But my colleague at Michigan State University, Eric Freedman who runs the Capital News Service, had an interesting thought of how such a feature could be a 24/7 source of quotes for other journalists. I hadn’t thought of it in that way. My hope is to build a “library” of such features that our readers and writers could tap. But there’s no reason that other writers could not use it in the same manner.

This experiment also prompted a balance of aesthetics and function. Our initial interest was to adopt a “frame” for the video that we use in some Knight Center online education modules. It looks like this. The advantage is that it creates a compact and neat package. But as Echo reporter Jeff Gillies noted, this feature seemed like something “out on an island” and not integrated into the look and feel of our site.

What’s more, integrating the video into the flash components and posting it into WordPress was a hassle. We opted instead to stack embedded YouTube videos into a typical Echo post. It looks like this.

It’s nowhere as neat or as elegant as the other option. But you know what? Neither is Echo. The feel of this feature is more consistent with our site. And the trade off in functionality - being able to post quickly - over aesthetics is one I think is worth making. Others may disagree.

There may be some middle ground here. MSU graduate assistant Mike Reed found a nifty WordPress plug-in that may be the best solution. It’s called Apture and it’s used for embedding multimedia into posts in a way that keeps readers on your site. Here is an example of how New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin uses it on his Dot Earth blog.

By David Poulson

NASA has a nice piece here on communicating climate change.

It embodies the principals of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid. That’s a nice acronym as a reminder of the need for clean writing that communicates clearly.

But it has always troubled me as some writers seem to think the need for simplicity implies that readers are, well, stupid.

Understanding an issue is not necessarily a measure of intelligence. It may be a measure of background, experience, time. Readers may be incredibly smart - they just haven’t had the opportunity, time or interest that you and your sources have had to dig into the issue you’re writing about.

It’s unfair to call them - well, most of them - stupid. If they don’t understand, perhaps it is the writer that is, er, less than intelligent. Or at least less than skilled. Or patient.

I do like the call for a 30-second elevator speech for communicating climate change. The advice in the NASA piece is to be concise, clear, jargon-free. Include a scientific point or two, perhaps all wrapped up in a metaphor.

That’s pretty good advice for a nut graph. It could be the kind of graph you keep in the “word depot” ready to get you out of a tight explanatory corner. If you find one that works for you, there’s no reason you can’t trot it out for more than one story. Some tools improve with use.

Bear in mind that this NASA piece cites a study indicating that only 7 percent of the population is completely dismissive of global warming. You’ll have a tough time reaching them regardless of rhetorical device.

That still leaves a healthy chunk of readers for you to serve.

By Dave Poulson

Six years ago the Society of Environmental Journalists gave the Washington Post an investigative reporting award for examining how public funds were spent on restoring the Everglades.

The Swamp showed how millions of tax dollars backed by good environmental intentions could be hijacked by special interests in ways harmful to the environment.

It’s a great story.

Yet I always wondered if that story would have been written if journalists dogged it earlier as it unfolded.

A nice plaque for unearthing a fiasco may be a sign of quality journalism. But where’s the plaque for doing the reporting that kept a disaster from happening? Is that not also watchdog journalism in the public interest?

SEJ held its 19th annual conference in Madison, Wisc., this past week. And because of the conference location, a federal initiative to restore the Great Lakes received some attention.

The Obama Administration has proposed nearly a half billion dollars this year as a downpayment on what could be a multi-year, multi-billion dollar restoration effort.

This bonanza has cash-starved agencies and interest groups scrambling with a new problem: How do you responsibly spend such a huge environmental investment?

It should also have Great Lakes journalists scrambling with a big question: How do you responsibly report the spending of such an investment as it unfolds?

It’s a question that I asked a panel which examined the new effort at the SEJ conference. Here’s what they said:

• Jeff Alexander, a longtime Great Lakes newspaper reporter and author, gave the answer you might expect from a journalist: “Follow the money.”  If a disproportionate amount is going for one purpose or to one recipient, find out why, he said. Where did it go? Did political pressure divert it?  If a cleanup in a reporter’s backyard is supposed to cost $10 million but ends up costing $15 million then ask, how come?
• Jane Elder, a longtime Great Lakes policy and communications expert and activist, said to “follow the benchmarks.”  When the plan defines environmental restoration, hold officials accountable for that definition, she said. And when it doesn’t, press officials hard to set the benchmarks that define success.
• Cam Davis, the Environmental Protection Agency’s point person on this effort, said federal officials understood the need for accountability.  As much as 14 percent of the funding is earmarked for monitoring progress, he said.  But he also said that this multi-prong, ecosystem-wide effort is unprecedented. While federal officials can monitor the progress of individual projects, there is no way to know how quickly the ecosystem will react, Davis warned.  “We’re going to have to have patience with the patient.”

That may make it tough to know when to declare success or failure.

Regardless, it’s clear that this kind of public works investment in the environment is more than a challenge to government officials, private contractors, scientists, environmental groups and politicians.

It is also a challenge to journalists.

And perhaps their success is not best measured by the satisfying presence of a plaque on the wall.

Sometimes a journalist’s success might be measured by early and aggressive reporting that prevents the need for the kind of stories that win those plaques

By David Poulson

The scarlet dye trailed across the ice like blood on a bedsheet.

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceangraphic Institution had lugged nine pounds of the concentrated pigment to a fissure in the Greenland ice sheet. The plan was to use the dye to trace the water melting from the ice as it disappeared to the land a half-mile below, lubricating the bedrock and speeding the ice’s march to the ocean. It’s an important mechanism to understand as scientists look at how the melting of the ice pack accelerates with global warming even faster than once predicted.

Students at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism got an up close look at the research last week from Woods Hole science writer Amy Nevala.

Amy, a Knight Center graduate, accompanied the researchers in 2008 to tell their story with regular reports from the field and articles in the institution’s Oceanus magazine. Later she edited a multimedia account of the trip, including the dye experiment. It’s a pretty good taste of some fascinating research, except…

Well, the scientists never did find where that dye came out.

A researcher 25 miles away each day for a week tested the water where satellite imagery seemed to indicate the dye should appear. No luck.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to this part of the piece was disappointment. I wanted to see that dye come out from beneath the ice sheet. But then I began to wonder: Where did it go? Did it get hung up in some vast lake suspended in mid-ice? Was the volume of water large enough to dilute any trace of the dye? Did the dye follow an entirely unanticipated route? Was it just slower than expected and later emerged after the researchers left?

My reaction perhaps was not unlike the researchers themselves. After all, just because an experiment does not work as expected doesn’t mean it is a failure. As my frustration turned to wonder, I felt a compulsion to turn the page, to read the next chapter of this story.

It is the kind of impulse that environmental journalists can use to their advantage. Unlike other journalists, our stories rarely conclude. Crooks get arrested, streets get paved, elections produce winners, city councils approve budgets, lawmakers pass laws. But the environmental story often is open-ended, leading to yet more speculation and uncertainty.

So use it.

Think of the environmental story as one of the world’s great mysteries. Tell it like the mystery story that it is. Put in the false starts, add the suspense, milk the frustration and dazzle with wonder. Unravel it as far as the facts allow. Take your reader to the brink of understanding. Then leave them with a cliffhanger.

If nothing else, you’re creating an audience for those hungering for the next installment.

The Woods Hole researchers planned to take what they learned and redesign their experiment. I sure hope Amy lets us know what happens next.

By David Poulson

In the midst of a headlong rush to develop slick new journalism tools, maybe we need to take a step back once and a while.

Don’t get me wrong. I think coming up with new ways to do journalism - especially environmental journalism - is an exciting challenge. But it makes some sense to spend some time applying the new stuff that gets invented instead of always looking for the next breakthrough.

MAPLight and the Open Secrets offer tools that are great for peering into the murky waters of federal campaign contributions. Both are great advances in government transparency.

If there is a knock against them, I’d have to say it lies in the overwhelming amount of data that they collect and make publicly available. Taking it all in is not unlike drinking from a firehose. But they’re powerful and exciting tools. And now that some smart visionaries developed them, perhaps the task of reducing that torrent of information to a manageable stream should fall to some of the rest of us.

At the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism we tried to do that recently with our Great Lakes Echo environmental news service.  Echo reporter Andrew Norman, fresh off an internship at Congressional Quarterly, took a small slice of all that data to deliver a focused news story.

He examined Congressional campaign contributions in relationship to a key climate change vote. He targeted just representatives of the eight states that Echo covers. It was a single issue with a geographic focus.

And it took the new media tools developed by MapLight and CRP and APPLIED them.

Check out the story and see what you think. It shows that House members from those states on average got significantly more campaign cash than the national average from advocates of the climate change bill. This has much more to do with the 125 Great Lakes representatives’ memberships and chairmanships in key committees than it does with proximity to fresh water.

That’s interesting stuff. It took a little while to figure out how to get there. But with practice, I’m betting we’ll get better, faster and find even more significant stories.

The best part is that Andrew didn’t have to invent new media tools to do it. He just had to be savvy enough to apply those developed by others.

And that, I would argue, has to be at least as significant as creating them in the first place.