Texan Erika McDonald has been a very busy environmental journalist lately.

In August 2002, she took the job as sole staff reporter for Houston Environmental News Update, a weekly email newsletter published by the local Citizens Environmental Coalition, or CEC.

During the past few months, she's also done much of the reporting for a new Austin edition of the newsletter, which was launched in October as an initial step toward the possible creation of a Texas-wide environmental news publication.

While engaged in these online enterprises, she has additionally reported on environmental issues for a local affiliate of the left-leaning Pacifica radio network. Meanwhile, she's produced pilot segments for a possible CEC-sponsored program on the listener-sponsored station.

All in all, her various activities illustrate some of the paths by which environmental journalism is finding its way into new formats outside the realm of conventional newspapers and broadcast outlets.

Although CEC is undisputably an environmental organization and not a news organization, McDonald says she brings an allegiance to traditional journalistic values to her work there.

"I approach things as I would with a straight news job," said the 2001 graduate of Houston's University of St. Thomas, where she majored in communication and was editor of the student newspaper. "I try to be fair to all sides. It's something I think about every time I pick up the phone."

This commitment to producing environmental –- as distinct from what might be called "environmentalist" –- news stories is consistent with the distinctive character of the Citizens Environmental Coalition itself, whose website also features the newsletter's content.

A longtime fixture of the Houston environmental scene, CEC is not an advocacy group in any traditional sense. It was founded in 1970 as an umbrella organization for dozens of diverse –- and sometimes at-odds –- environmental and related groups. These member entities range from recognized advocates such as the Sierra Club to others including garden clubs, professional societies and the Houston Corporate Recycling Council.

A mission statement says CEC "fosters dialogue, education, education, and collaboration about environmental issues and serves as an informational clearinghouse for the benefit of its members and the community at large."

Funding for the coalition comes from individuals, foundations and companies, although CEC executive director David Gresham said it forgoes corporate contributions for "hard news" activities, to avoid conflict-of-interest appearances. Ongoing support for the newsletter was provided by Houston Endowment, a major philanthropy founded by one of city's foremost business leaders in the early 20th century. The Endowment formerly owned the Houston Chronicle.

Even so, McDonald said she occasionally finds that "industry and government sources are not that interested in talking to [a reporter working for] CEC."

The newsletter regularly features environmental event listings and brief announcements by some of the coalition's member organizations. In addition to original articles, its news content includes links to recent stories in other publications (typically, the Houston Chronicle, and in the new Austin edition, the Austin American-Statesman).

McDonald wrote all the newsletter's original news articles –- usually, two or three per issue -– until recently. With the extra work now necessary to put out an Austin edition, CEC has also started running a few articles by volunteer reporters, and sometimes paid freelancers.

"The (CEC) board wants local stories and environmental issues," she said, recounting the instructions she received when she assumed the job from the newsletter's initial reporter.

Within the context of that broad directive, she said she has "a lot of autonomy" to make coverage decisions. "I've tried to push the envelope on what they mean by 'environmental.'"

Her work is also informed by a hard-edged journalistic philosophy: "What makes something news is a story of power, when decision-makers and those who are impacted by their decisions are not the same. News is the story of that relationship."

In recent months, some of the articles in the Houston newsletter have dealt with major, multidimensional issues including local battles over a pair of freeway projects, a city stormwater-drainage fee, a light rail referendum, and a container-ship terminal. Others, meanwhile, dealt with more straightforwardly "environmental" news, such as regulatory actions by the state's pollution control agency.

McDonald says she especially relishes being the first journalist to report a story. Modest as the CEC publication is by comparison, she unhesitatingly says she considers Houston's daily newspaper as her principal competition when it comes to news on their mutual home turf.

"I try to do original stuff," she said. "Often, the Chronicle misses something, or I do the same story with a different angle."

She was particularly pleased last year, for instance, when she beat the Chronicle, and other mainstream news organizations, in reporting a discovery of elevated levels of a toxic flame retardant in Texas women's breast milk by a researcher affiliated with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

The study, which detected the chemical contaminating breast milk from all 47 women who were involved, was the first of its kind in the U.S., according to the UT scientist. The CEC newsletter published a story about the discovery Aug. 22, a few days after it was made public in the online edition of Environmental Health Perspectives, a scientific journal.

The Chronicle and Associated Press did not publish articles on the study until Sept. 20 –- a day after the university issued a press release. Shortly afterward, the subject received national media attention when the activist Environmental Working Group on Sept. 23 announced its own similar research findings about breast milk samples from 20 women in 14 states.

This is the sixth article in an Environment Writer series on web-based environmental journalism.