Cover the Planet

By David Poulson

Perhaps in my quest for reader eyeballs and Web clicks I went a little overboard today.

As I mentioned, we’ve launched an experimental environmental news service. The Great Lakes Echo aggregates environmental news stories from our region and supplements them with original stories.

That content is provided largely by Knight Center students and another journalism project at MSU called Capital News Service. CNS covers the news coming out of Michigan’s state capital.

Perhaps someday we’ll raise enough money or partner with enough other journalism schools that we can feed the beast daily with quality original copy. Meanwhile, to extend our offerings we’re also souping up some glorified links to stories produced elsewhere.

Today we did that with a story that ran first in The Windsor (Ontario) Star. The story was about the growth of invasive species in the Great Lakes. It mentioned that the bloody red shrimp is the latest of these critters that cause all kinds of ecological havoc. The story has a nice image and a villain with a colorful name. Maybe our treatment drove some traffic toward the Windsor Star, giving that reporter greater justification for environmental stories.

I do a bit of social media marketing in hopes of driving some traffic our way. Today, my Facebook status read: Bloody Red Shrimp attack the Great Lakes. See Great Lakes Echo: http://tr.im/i2G

Carol Swinehart, who works at Michigan Sea Grant and does a lot of communication work regarding invasives, noted on my post: “You do know that we’ve been dealing with them for three years, right?”

I did. But making the attack sound imminent certainly sold the story better. And technically, it’s true. They attacked the Great Lakes three years ago and they still do. And how can you resist hyping something called the bloody red shrimp?

So I had my salesman’s hat on in this case. But was I misleading? Did I sow distrust of the media? Was I ethical?

What do you think?

Carol didn’t seem to mind. To my suggestion that Attack of the GIANT Bloody Red Shrimp would make a great movie title, she responded with “Co-starring Helga the Hydrilla, of course!”

Hydrilla is another Great Lakes invasive. Helga is a character Carol sometimes plays - in costume - as a creative way of communicating their threat.

I suggested that we had the beginnings of a great new monster partnership like Godzilla and Rodan and with a cliched tagline: They came from the deep!!!

Carol put a wet blanket on that one. “Well, hydrilla doesn’t go super deep…so far,” she said.

I hate it when the facts get in the way of a good headline.

By David Poulson

Dan Egan at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just won a National Headliner Award with his series Great Lakes, Great Peril.

That’s just the latest national accolade in a career that has produced some remarkable environmental reporting from a guy who modestly characterizes himself as a feature writer with curiosity.

Not that we’re claiming there is a direct correlation, but I will note that Dan is a graduate of the Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute. You might want to check out how to apply for this year’s upcoming institute which is taught by the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.

Again, we don’t promise that attending the institute will result in receiving national recognition for environmental reporting. But maybe we can push you in the right direction.

Perhaps most impressive is that Dan isn’t the only one churning out environmental stories with impact over at the Sentinel. Reporters Susanne Rust and Meg Kissenger have received a boatload of national recognition this year - Meeman, Oakes, Polk - for their aggressive reporting on the health effects and poor regulation of a plastic additive.

This list is not inclusive of all the recognition these fine journalists have received. But wow. There must be more than invasive species and Bisphenol A in the water over in Milwaukee. Whatever it is we need to bottle it and distribute it to news organizations nationwide.

Alas, you cannot bottle institutional commitment. Here’s to the Journal Sentinel for recognizing the importance of environmental issues.

By David Poulson

If you missed the Writing Green Environmental Journalism Conference in Knoxville Friday you still have plenty of opportunity to participate.

The conference sponsored by the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists is blanketed by social media. University of Tennessee students are all over a Ning site with conference-related forums, blogs and photos.

Ning not your thing? Then mosey on over to Facebook where the students will give you even more of the same. In both venues you can continue to bat around environmental issues and how to cover them.

And to coordinate all that coverage check out the conference Twitter hashtag of #WritingGreen.

And contribute to all three. You don’t have to be there to play. And your participation will extend the value of a worthy endeavor.

By David Poulson

I confess to a particularly strong fascination with satellite imagery. I think it stems from that most forgotten of journalism Ws - the where that I wrote about earlier.

There’s nothing like getting up high to get a sense of a story. A photographer I once worked with insisted on renting an airplane to cover just about any assignment we teamed up on. But nowadays you can get much higher and without ever leaving the office.

One of my favorite sources of satellite images is NASA’s Earth Observatory. You can spend a lot of time looking in there. Heck, I subscribe to their e-mail digests just to get surprised with whatever pictures they select as the week’s highlights. They even put them together in some interesting features. One called Cities at Night: The View from Space contains images that almost demand to have a story written about them.

So when Matt Cimitile said he wanted to write a story about the health effects of light pollution and efforts to preserve the night sky, I knew exactly where to find the images to illustrate it. Matt is a graduate assistant at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism who is producing copy for our just-launched Great Lakes Echo news service.

And talk about serendipity.  The upcoming Earth Hour where people are encouraged to turn off lights for an hour gave us a great news peg. Take a look at Matt’s effort.

And hey, that peg’s still out there. Earth Hour is on Saturday.

And if you’re lucky, NASA may even have a night time satellite image of your city somewhere in its archives.

Meanwhile, check out this astronaut-guided tour of cities at night from around the world.

By David Poulson

Blogs are great tools for journalists to use to explain how they chased a story. There is nothing the matter with letting readers in on the process.

The downside is it takes time. It’s like reporting and writing the same story twice, but with different perspectives. But the payoff is that it builds credibility if you explain how you got onto a story, the twists it took and even the the missteps that you made and corrected.

Jim Bruggers, who covers the environment for the Louisville (Ky) Courier-Journal, did exactly that with a confusing story involving mountaintop mining. In the heart of coal country perhaps no other environmental story sparks as much controversy. So it was a big deal when it appeared that the Obama Administration was cracking down on the practice Tuesday.

Jim has an excellent blog called Watchdog Earth. On Wednesday he used it to describe how the mountain top mining story developed and the faulty assumptions made by both sources and journalists.

Check it out for an excellent example of how to build credibility and understanding through transparency.

By David Poulson

Today the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism launched a new environmental news service called Great Lakes Echo.

We’ve been fooling around for quite some time with news aggregators and even wikis - trying to play an active role in figuring out the future of environmental reporting. The new Great Lakes Echo draws upon a number of lessons we’ve learned. It concentrates environmental news reported in the Great Lakes states and provinces. And it allows users to categorize that news by topic or region.

We’re enhancing searchability with tags for hot topics. And readers can comment not only on stories, but on links to stories that appear elsewhere.

Perhaps most exciting is that we’ve built in a provision for original news reports. Initially these stories will be reported by students here at Michigan State University. We hope to recruit the efforts of students at other Great Lakes regional universities. The service certainly can play an educational role. At the same time students provide a service while pushing innovation.

But we also look at this as an opportunity to build a proof-of-concept for attracting funding to support nonprofit environmental reporting. I’d like nothing better than to have a full-time staff of professional journalists covering the most important beat in the middle of one of the nation’s most sensitive regions.

I won’t belabor the non-profit model of journalism here. I’ve already written about that concept and noted examples.

This is hardly a solution for replacing the environmental and other reporting we are losing with the decline of mainstream media. But I think universities have a role to play in the creation and distribution of knowledge. And they certainly have a role in innovating and figuring out the structures that tap the digital revolution while supporting quality work.

Stop by and take a look. We appreciate your suggestions here at CoverThePlanet or over at the Great Lakes Echo as we figure out how to further develop this experiment.

By David Poulson

The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism has set this year’s Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute for June 9 through June 13.

The details are here.

This is our 10th such regional workshop. Each is different. One year we went to the boreal forest in Canada. Another year we stayed at a scientific research station in northern Michigan. Another year we stayed close to home but still went canoeing, rock climbing AND fossil-hunting.

And the year the field trip was rained out we took everyone to see The Day After Tomorrow, just to make fun of the faulty climate change science in the film.

But to make it clear, our workshops are not Outward Bound for journalists. Often, like this year, we host them right here in East Lansing at Michigan State University. We expose participants to scientists, policymakers, journalists. They pick up story ideas. They learn from each other.

And sometimes they gripe and moan to each other about editors and the state of journalism. That’s OK. Because once they get that out of their system they always agree on the importance of fighting for strong environmental reporting. Perhaps the best part of these workshops is that they get a group of like-minded people into the same room to discuss the hottest beat going.

This year’s session will continue to provide those story idea, source development and networking opportunities. But the state of journalism has prompted us to emphasize skills-building sessions. That’s in recognition of the need to hone new ways of reporting. Lab activities will again include Computer-Assisted Reporting. But fellows will also learn to produce video for the Web, edit audio, use social media, produce soundslides, shoot images.

And in a quirky twist, we’re looking to explore the concept of journalistic entrepreneurship in the face of a troubled industry.

We still have a few open sessions that we reserve for last minute ideas. Feel free to suggest some here on CoverThePlanet or e-mail them directly to me at poulson@msu.edu.

Meanwhile, if you’re covering the environment in the Great Lakes region at least part time, consider applying. Information is here. The deadline is April 17.

By David Poulson

Mark Neuzil has a nifty story on MinnPost.com about the challenges of raising sustainable beef.

I like his writing technique here for a number of reasons. Check out this description:

The temperature is in the low single digits, but these cows are not, nor have ever been, inside a barn. They have never had a shot of antibiotics, growth hormones, steroids or eaten a bushel of corn. Their coats are so long and thick that by mid-March on the prairie a person’s hand can disappear into them and not touch hide.

You know what lets you write like that? You have to be there. The forgotten “W” of journalism’s who, what, where, when, why is always the where. It is the casualty of thinly stretched journalists forced to do too much reporting by phone or e-mail. Yet to a writer scrambling for tools to tell a story, this “W” is critical, particularly with environmental stories.

You have to stick your hand into that thick coat in the middle of March if you want to describe it the way Mark does here.

The quotes are sweet, too. Check this one out:

“They called us tree-huggers,” Mary Jo said. “And then we started cutting down almost all the trees.”

You’ll need to read the story to get all the nuance wrapped up there.

But perhaps what I like most about this story also makes me the most uncomfortable. Mark has very deliberately inserted himself:

I am a customer. A fellow from the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia has sent me to the Forbords’ organic farm with his highest recommendation for its all-grass-fed, all-natural beef. I have nicknamed my steer “Larry,” although my wife and children prefer the number 713, which was on the tags Luverne attached to his ears. I am attempting to follow Larry/713 from Starbuck farm to St. Paul plate.

With rare exceptions I work hard to keep myself out of my stories. I always felt that technique best reserved for columns. But like it or not, Web writing is establishing new rules.

Mark, whose day job is as a journalism professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, also struggles with the adjustment. He writes three to four stories a month, although most are not this long.

“I gotta tell you as an old AP and newspaper guy, the hardest thing I do in these Web stories is to make them more personal,” he wrote in an e-mail. “And the editors are always asking for that… or more analysis off the news. We don’t really do breaking news per se at MinnPost.

“Funny thing about the Larry story is, I wrote it basically without looking at a single note. And I interviewed the farmer twice on the phone and then spent the better part of the day on the farm. And a zillion e-mail follow-ups. And I thought it flowed pretty well, all things considered.

“I’m learning, too. And I’m over 50.”

Me too.

The Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media has published four reaction pieces to the critique of climate change reporting that I referenced in the previous post:

• Bill Allen, an assistant professor of science journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, sees the analysis as a call to reporters, publishers, editors and shareholders that Joseph Pulitzer would be quick to heed.
• Mark Neuzil, who teaches at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of St. Thomas, agrees with the conclusions but questions some methodology.
• Tom Yulsman, co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, references a wonderful quote: “It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”
• And me, who in addition to my earlier March Madness post, says the analysis points to the need for a race-to-the-moon kind of commitment to the research and development of new journalism institutions.

Eric Pooley, who wrote the piece while at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, reacts to the comments. The Yale Forum also has a link to his original analysis.

By David Poulson

A highly critical analysis of climate change journalism was produced recently by a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

A crude summary of Eric Pooley’s piece might go something like this: Most journalists have finally stopped reporting climate change science as if there are two equally credible and balanced sides. It took at least 10 years to get there. But now they’re repeating the mistake by failing to challenge faulty and biased studies that inflate the costs of addressing climate change. And we don’t have 10 years to get that story right.

I don’t want to touch those fights off here. There are plenty of other places where you can try to shoot holes in the climate change science and economics with which you disagree.

What I’d like to address is Pooley’s vision of a journalist: Reporters who merely take dictation - writing he said/she said stories - shirk their responsibilities. And reporters who prefer to be judges or advocates should get a column or a blog.

But Pooley says there is another path, one where reporters act as referees “keeping score, throwing flags when a team plays fast and loose with the facts, explaining to the audience what’s happening on the field and why.”

That’s hard work. Such reporters must be transparent, Pooley says. “When they make a judgment, they must present the evidence upon which it is based.”

That can make journalists less than popular. “By stating conclusions rather than merely hinting at them, referees can make themselves targets, open to attack from aggrieved combatants,” Pooley says.

No kidding. Look what happened to New York Times reporter Andy Revkin when he recently called climate change fouls on both former Vice President Al Gore and conservative columnist George Will.

But you know what? Too bad. To tweak Pooley’s analogy in honor of March Madness, practicing journalism - good journalism - may mean taking a few elbows. And maybe you have to throw a few. The pursuit of truth is a contact sport.

There is nothing the matter with journalists taking the side of truth and accuracy. Yeah, I know - easy for me to say. That kind of journalism takes an incredible amount of work, time, knowledge, experience. Meanwhile the people and institutions that practice our profession in the traditional way dwindle. Who, how and how well they’ll be replaced is anyone’s guess.

But as we figure that out, I’d like to keep in sight that metaphor of journalist as referee, one with a loud whistle - but who can also take a few elbows in the paint.