When the Environmental News Network unveils a new website design with new features in July, it will be another step in the decade-long evolution of a publication that calls itself "the largest, most definitive and professional Internet portal for all things related to the environment."

At the same time ENN makes such dramatic statements about what it is, publisher Jerry Kay readily acknowledges that it is "not principally a hard-news environmental publication."

Instead, despite the CNN-like name, there's more of a news-you-can-use orientation. ENN mixes articles from traditional wire services with feature stories originally written for other publications, columns, original audio programming, press releases that nonprofit "affiliates" and commercial businesses pay to post on the site, plus interactive features including quizzes and polls.

Kay, a veteran broadcaster who hosts ENN's radio programs, changed the website's focus when he assumed its top job about three years ago -- from generating original content, to the current emphasis on packaging content that is produced elsewhere.

"There's been no shift in the philosophy of what we do, and that is news, our primary mission," he said. "But also, there's always been a consistent component, which shouldn't be seen as less important, of letting readers turn that into something useful in their personal lives."

ENN sometimes uses the word "news" more loosely than more traditional publications. On its home page, for instance, links to businesses' press releases appear under the heading "Marketplace News: Stories and ideas from environmentally focused companies."

Asked about this terminology, Kay said he believes it's important for readers to understand that press releases are not "news" in the conventional journalistic sense, and he would change the "Marketplace News" heading in the upcoming redesign.

Environmental News Network started as a monthly print publication called Environmental News Briefing in 1993, then became ENN.com in 1995. New material used to be posted on this website daily, but now that happens four days a week, Tuesday through Friday.

Originally, "ENN saw itself as a gatherer of news," Kay said. "They wanted to generate original content themselves, which was a noble cause, and they did it well."

However, that approach didn't prove to be viable "as a business model," he said. "How many writers can you employ to cover the world's environmental news?"

Now, ENN "emphasizes editors rather than writers," he said, comparing the website to the digest-style Utne Reader magazine, which presents articles culled from a large number of other publications.

The sources of ENN's republished journalism are more limited.

Stories are selected from three wire services -- AP, Reuters and Knight-Ridder. Feature articles primarily come from E/The Environmental Magazine, GreenBiz.com, and publications of the California Academy of Sciences, where Kay formerly chaired the Department of Environmental Media.

ENN also publishes columns by Canadian scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki and South African journalist and activist Don Pinnock, along with some material by freelancers and staff writers.

The organization's staff also includes editors and technical professionals, but Kay declined to say how many employees there are altogether.

ENN is published by a for-profit corporation, which is owned by shareholder-investors but not publicly traded. The same company, based in Berkeley, California, also includes GroupStone, a web-services firm that caters to nonprofit organizations such as the American Red Cross, Pew Oceans Commission and United Nations Foundation.

GroupStone's own website says it was "borne out of the success of Environmental News Network," and that "GroupStone is carrying on that tradition with other nonprofit communities, including consumer health, humanitarian relief, animal welfare, human rights, and arts and culture."

Kay said he came on board at ENN as publisher at a time when a "new administration" at the company decided its "value was in the software" created for the ENN website.

Some of ENN's pages promote that technological asset in a small, ad-like blurb declaring that ENN's "direct services are powered by GroupStone, the leader in web communication technology and services for nonprofit corporations." The corporate link between ENN and GroupStone is not mentioned.

Kay said GroupStone only supplies ENN's software for the website's "tens of thousands" of Internet pages, and provides no editorial content about GroupStone's own nonprofit clients.

Nonprofit environmental groups and educational institutions, some of them ENN affiliates, do appear regularly in the publication's originally produced content such as the weekly ENN Radio, an hour-long Icicle Networks show with several interview segments, and the 90-second installments of the nationally syndicated EarthNews Radio, which typically focuses on one organization. Both programs are also webcast on ENN.com.

(Nonprofit affiliates pay $300 a year to post an unlimited number of press releases. They are also provided an opportunity to be "featured on ENN.com one day during their membership period." ENN's similar program for businesses costs $600 a year. A maximum of 12 press releases can be posted, and there is no offer to be featured on the website.) ENN's home page states that ENN Radio "includes interviews with ENN affiliates." For instance, the May 26 program's four interview segments included one about the work of an affiliate, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. In addition, there were brief mentions of the subjects of recent press releases from four other affiliates (including the UN Environment Programme and World Resources Institute), which led off the program. Next came the main segment, about West Nile virus, which included interviews with officials of two government agencies in the San Francisco area and a representative of a local environmental group not listed as an ENN affiliate.

The $300 fee of the affiliate program for non-profit organizations "will never generate a profit" for ENN, but is intended to make the effort "sustainable," said Kay, whose resume includes jobs as public affairs director at one San Francisco radio station, KFRC, and as a program host at another, KCBS.

His own involvement with the nonprofit community predates his hiring as ENN's producer. With his wife Chris, he founded Science Interchange, a nonprofit corporation based Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in 1996. Its mission statement addresses educating the public about science and the environment, "building the communications skills and public outreach efforts of nonprofit organizations," and "changing the face of the environmental movement by training the next generation of science and environmental reporters."

Science Interchange became the base for production of the EarthNews radio reports (which Kay had begun in 1988 under the name Science in Action), and in 1998 founded Teen Environmental Media Network, a training program for high school journalists. This latter effort is now a project of the Environmental Education Council of Marin, a coalition of environmental and community groups, educators and businesses.