Cover the Planet

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

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

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.

By David Poulson

Even if you’re suffering Michael Jackson overload, you’ve just got to love this tribute to the pop star that was recently performed at Toolik Lake, Alaska.

It features scientists at an arctic research station dancing in what some claim to be the northernmost production of Thriller. I’m not sure who would contest such a claim. But make sure to check out the costumes topped with netted headgear. They’re well-suited to tundra research on the north slope of the Brooks Range.

And if you doubt the need for the nets, watch for the mosquitoes flicking by the camera lens.

I spent two weeks at Toolik eight or nine years ago on a science writing fellowship. I can easily believe that these researchers welcomed the chance to get down. Miles and months from civilization along with 24 hours of sunlight make for a recipe for spontaneous zaniness.

The year I visited, the crew staged a Fourth of July parade featuring some floats that could be described as R-rated. (Sorry. What happens in Toolik does not necessarily stay in Toolik.)

This year’s production was no hastily put together event.

George Kling, a University of Michigan scientist and longtime Toolik researcher, reports by e-mail: “They practiced for several nights, all together, small groups in the lab (but not while they were filtering, I saw to that…), and it was good fun for them all.”

Journalists in camp this year shot the video and reported the event.

What’s this got to do with the environment? I’ll argue that this is a significant environmental story. But the angle isn’t the science. It’s the fact that scientists, just like the rest of us, like to have fun.

A story about scientists going a little nuts in the midst of an intense research effort can go a long way toward making them more accessible to the public. There is nothing in the journalism rule book requiring that they be portrayed as uptight, white-coated eggheads devoid of humor - unless they are.

A good example is this story about a scientist who was the first to discover a harmful fish invading the Great Lakes. I remember it not because of the discovery, but because the discoverer is also a blues guitarist.

In honor of his discovery, he composed - and often performed - a piece called The Galloping Goby Blues.

My advice: You catch a scientist busting a move, you’ve got a prime hook for capturing attention for a story that might otherwise go unread.

By David Poulson

You’ve got to love a Web site that advances journalism not so much with dazzling technology but by emphasizing basic journalistic values.

That’s pretty much what they do over at Politifact.com. Journalists there truth-test political statements. And in a nod toward the shades of gray that make such a pursuit so challenging, they use a truth-o-meter with a bottom setting wonderfully titled “pants on fire.”

I’m hardly the only fan of this St. Petersburg Times site. It won the 2009 Pulitzer for national reporting for coverage of the 2008 election.

That’s nice. But checking veracity hardly need be limited to national election coverage. That’s a good function for a journalist covering anything, especially the environment. There are certainly enough extreme claims by a variety of people on a raft of environmental issues.

Maybe too often we get caught up in stitching together complex stories. Perhaps we should focus more on parsing issues for the truth, even dribbling bits of it out over time as we learn more.

Reporting what people say about the environment is easy. Checking out what they say requires time. But it certainly isn’t brain surgery. And it’s the kind of thing sure to drive readership, and emphasize the value that professional reporters bring to information-gathering’s wild west.

Now the folks at Politifact give you a headstart. Check out this YouTube primer on how they do it:

By David Poulson

I still haven’t seen the full Earth 2100 that ABC News broadcast this week. That’s the global climate change story told in the year 2100 through the eyes of a fictional woman born in 2009.

But I did view the online clips. What’s more I brought it up in my journalism ethics class. I asked two questions: Is it journalism when you quote a fictional source? And if it is, is it responsible journalism?

Students struggled with this. Some wondered if this was a creative way to push people to think of future consequences of present actions. Journalists are pretty good at covering disasters after they happen. Is this a way to cover them before they happen? Is that a good role for a journalist? Or is it mere informed speculation?

There was concern for whether this technique was pioneering an exciting new field of journalism or if it is a disastrous turn down the wrong path.

“Do you want to save journalism by completely blurring the line between what is real and what is entertainment?” asked one student.

Another thought the feature was creative, informative and worthwhile: “I just don’t think it’s journalism,” she said. “It reminds me of the Magic School Bus.”

Yet another said that the creative approach undermined credibility. This student thought charts and graphs like in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth represented a more effective journalism. Countered another: The use of the comic book character is “an awesome tool to reach an audience that has not grasped it yet.”

Some were uncomfortable with straying so far from the traditional technique of using sources to move the story. In traditional journalism, “you don’t say anything yourself. It’s always from the source. This story is about a girl who is a source, but she’s not real.”

Getting at greater truths has always been a hallmark of fine fiction. But is it journalism?

And should that matter?

By David Poulson

In my early reporting days Ralph - a good friend and photographer with whom I often worked - often hassled me whenever I made out a photo assignment for him.

“How would you like it if I took a picture and assigned you to write a story to go with it,” he’d sneer. It irked me mostly because I knew he was right. Ralph had tons more journalism experience - heck he had at least 30 years on me at the time - and certainly knew news. What was I doing telling him what to shoot?

As a consequence I quickly learned to use the wisdom of photographers who possess it. Not only could they tip me to great stories I was otherwise oblivious to, their art often launched even my most pedestrian prose onto the front page.

That’s no great insight. Savvy reporters quickly learn this.

But how do you apply this lesson in the digital age? A good example is this story written by Jeff Gillies for GreatLakesEcho.org. It’s about the annual spring runoff that shifts tons of soil into the Great Lakes, an event exacerbated by intensive farming and loss of vegetative cover.

It happens every year. What makes it news now?

In this case, it’s the accompanying satellite images Jeff used to illustrate the story. The image of muddied water visible from space had been posted on an environmental listserv. Its existence is precisely what triggered the story.

What’s more, Jeff used another satellite image to drive the story home. It shows the algae blooms triggered later in the summer by the presence of the excessive nutrient load delivered in the spring.

I’ve written before about using satellite images to enhance stories.

This is an example of how they can produce story ideas.

By David Poulson

Today on the GreatLakesEcho.org we posted a link to a story about a new test to determine if water is safe for swimming.

This story noted that traditional E. coli tests are a crude instrument that sometimes cause beaches to be needlessly closed. The new test, and others that may yet to be developed, gives a more precise indicator of a particular problem, according to the story.

The story prompted some pointed criticism from a faculty member someone who works in the faculty of forestry at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. You can read it at the bottom of the page.

That’s a great thing about social media. Readers with varied expertise can vet a story quickly. I would argue that this criticism added significant context, information, correction to this story.

But I’m wondering what our proper response should be. You could say that we are better informing the public. We’re furthering the distribution - remember, we didn’t write this, we’re just pointing to it - of a story while adding valuable reader-provided expert context.

You could also argue that we’re furthering the distribution of a story that - if this criticism is accurate - fails to measure up to our own standards of accuracy. Perhaps it is impinging on our own credibility - particularly among readers who fail to understand that we both write stories and point to the stories of others.

Perhaps the best response is to pull the story.

Our response is further complicated by scant resources. We can hardly vet every comment or story.

Is it enough to leave that to the readers?