Environmental Media Services, an information resource since 1994 for journalists covering environmental issues, has evolved into a new, smaller organization with a tighter focus – EMS/Science Communication Network, which is in the process of being launched.

The Washington-based EMS, funded by progressive foundations and closely allied with major environmental groups, had about 15 employees at one point and worked to provide information to reporters on a broad range of issues.

EMS/Science Communication Network, with three staff members for now, will focus exclusively on a smaller set of topics – specifically, those related to "environmental public heath, scientific integrity and green chemistry," said Amy Kostant, a longtime EMS staff member and director of the new organization.

EMS/Science Communication Network, like the original EMS, will seek to be "a clearinghouse between experts and journalists," offering many of the same kinds of services such as backgrounders and press briefings, Kostant said.

The EMS website, now devoid of most of its one-time content, is being revamped to reflect the new organization's identity and will be unveiled soon, she said.

Unlike EMS, however, EMS/Science Communication Network will not provide a daily news summary. Where that service once appeared under the heading News Center, the EMS website now offers a link to Environmental Health News, another news-summary website that was launched by a separate nonprofit in 2003.

The original EMS started the Science Communication Network four years ago as a project aimed at fighting what EMS founder and president Arlie Schardt, in an interview with Environment Writer in 2003, called "the stealth attack on sound science" that underlies environmental and public health measures.

Schardt, a former national newsmagazine journalist, author, ACLU official and executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense), has retired and now serves on the EMS/Science Communication Network board, Kostant said.

In contrast to the independent EMS, the new EMS/Science Communication Network is a project of the Tides Center, a nonprofit organization that provides what it calls fiscal and infrastructure support to charitable initiatives that are not themselves incorporated as nonprofits. EMS long had been closely aligned with, though technically separate from, the politically liberal Fenton Communications.

During its heyday in the 1990s, EMS earned high marks from some prominent reporters for its Washington breakfast briefings on assorted issues, in which the group assembled "experts from academic, government, business, science, medical, and public interest communities," as its promotional literature said. At the same time, reporters recognized EMS as providing a "green" perspective on issues it addressed.

For several years, EMS had West Coast offices in Seattle and San Francisco, but that operation was spun off as an independent organization, EMS West, in 2002, and it changed its name to Resource Media in 2003. (See article, July/August issue, EW.) Resource Media's website now lists 20 staff members and five offices in four western states.

Over the years, EMS was the target of criticism from conservative and industry-linked organizations and individuals for activities such as its promotion of the investigative book Our Stolen Future, published in 1996, which dealt with the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on humans and wildlife.

The politically liberal and activist Schardt was often an outspoken critic, himself, declaring President Bush in his 2003 interview with Environment Writer as "a threat to democracy." Beginning in 2003, EMS began issuing background papers under the heading Bush Greenwatch, which "track(ed) the Bush administration's environmental misdeeds." In January, the environmental group Friends of the Earth took over the Bush Greenwatch service.