In just a few months, former foundation executive Pete Myers' daily email news summary, "Above The Fold," and its companion website, Environmental Health News, have become known as highly useful tools for environmental journalists.

The reason can be grasped in just a glance at a one recent issue, March 24. On that day alone, online subscribers received a list of links to articles from the New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Nature, Johannesburg Independent, The Guardian, Chemical and Engineering News and Syracuse Post-Standard.

In addition, they were directed to the Environmental Health News website, where a typically voluminous list of additional article summaries and links appeared -- 64 in all -- from newspapers and other publications around the world. As on other days, most were related in some way to the service's broad topic of pollution and exposure to environmental contaminants.

An obvious question is how Myers has been able to provide such a far-reaching service, day after day, working practically by himself so far. Although he laughingly said that providing an answer would be a little like pulling back the famous curtain in the Wizard of Oz, he didn't hesitate to reveal his secret:

First, he said, he employs a number of "canned searches" through Google News, developed over time to reduce the possibility of missing key stories.

Second, "some papers are not indexed by Google but have good reporters, and I make sure to go to those sites."

Third, because even Google's "incredibly valuable" searches miss some things around "the periphery" of the broad subject area on which he focuses, he also surveys about 50 newspaper websites daily.

It's clearly been a lot of work for Myers, who has a PhD in animal ecology and who was formerly senior vice president for science at the National Audubon Society and a director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation. Myers also is a co-author, with Theo Culburn and former Boston Globe environmental reporter Dianne Dumanoski, of "Our Stolen Future," a well-known book about hormone-disrupting chemicals.

"It turns out that doing this every day has been more time consuming than I expected, but I wanted it to be predictable, reliable and comprehensive," he said.

With just a few exceptions, he has been able to produce new editions daily, issued around mid-morning Eastern Time, even when he was thousands of miles away in Hawaii or other countries.

He's been looking for people to help with the work, which will soon include providing a searchable database of articles on the website. Perhaps a year from now, Myers also hopes to unveil yet another search engine "to give context to individual articles" –- links to related stories and to related scientific studies.

Now a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, he was a funder of the organization at the now-defunct Jones Foundation. It was during his 1990-2001 association with the foundation that Myers said he became increasingly impressed by how rapidly the science of environmental health was changing.

In late 2001, when the Jones Foundation disbanded, he started thinking about what service he might provide that would make it easier to learn about, and report on, this field.

"I had the germ of an idea of a news service that collates how the news media are covering environmental health and what's new in the science," he said. A year later, in late 2002, he realized that new software tools facilitating the aggregation and dissemination of news made the idea a possibility. The Environmental Health News website appeared in June 2003 and the first Above The Fold summaries were e-mailed last August.

Myers' resume includes advocacy work, but he said he casts a broad net in picking articles to feature.

"It's important for people to understand what's current in the press," he said. "We don't try to be censors, though I've bitten my tongue now and then because I believed some articles were spinning, particularly in the opinion section."

Still, he thinks more information is better than less: "We'll all be better off if we're fully informed."

Besides the news summary, which appears on the left side of the EHN homepage under the heading "In the News," there are two other sections –- "New Science," which has links to recent studies, and "New Reports," with links to publications by advocacy groups such as U.S. PIRG and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Environmental Health News and Above The Fold are products of the not-for-profit Environmental Health Sciences, which also produces two other websites – http://www.OurStolenFuture.org, and, in partnership with another group, http://www.ProtectingOurHealth.org.

The latter site, Myers said, is designed to further his "goal to make new scientific findings accessible to people with conditions that might be linked to environmental exposures" –- conditions for which "good science is saying it's plausible there are links."

EHS, the parent group, has received funding from the Jenifer Altman Foundation, Beldon Fund, Homeland Foundation, John Merck Fund, David and Lucile Packard Foundation and V.K. Rasmussen Foundation, according to the Environmental Health News website.

Compiling the news summaries daily has been challenging, but also enlivening, work, Myers said.

"One of the invigorating things about Environmental Health News is seeing the topography of stories every day, in which some bubble up and are then picked up by national venues."