by Bill Dawson

Environmental journalists, particularly those working in the West, can expect to be hearing more from a new, conservation-promoting public relations organization called Resource Media.

Actually, it's just that name that’s new -- as of June.

Resource Media used to be EMS West, a name it used after spinning off last year from the influential Washington-based Environmental Media Services. That original EMS was founded, and is still headed, by former national newsmagazine journalist and environmental group leader Arlie Schardt in 1994. It has served since then as a major PR arm of the national environmental movement.

The latest name change, to Resource Media, represents another, identity-clarifying step in what participants describe as the wholly friendly process by which EMS's former Western operation has separated from its founding parent organization.

The split, they say, was inspired largely by funding concerns. As such, it illustrates recent, economy-linked fluctuations in the fortunes and alignments of foundation-driven advocacy efforts in the environmental arena.

Resource Media and the original EMS, both structured as nonprofit communications firms that depend largely on donations from environmentally oriented philanthropies, now operate independently. But Resource Media personnel say they continue to follow a basic guiding principle set forth by Schardt at EMS -- to try to increase coverage of crucial environmental issues.

'not at cross purposes' with EMS

"We have pretty much the same mission -- we're not at cross-purposes, we don't see ourselves as competitors," said Kristin Hyde Block, a senior program director for Resource Media in Seattle. She first worked for EMS in Washington, then opened the Seattle office as its initial Western outpost five years ago.

"We're better off having environmental issues covered in the media than not covered in the media," said Scott Miller, a former environmental reporter at Seattle's KING TV, who left that job to become a co-director of Resource Media late last year, after its separation from EMS.

Both EMS and Resource Media work with organizations they call "partners" to help get their advocacy message out to the press and public. And both also seek, more generally, to be informational resources for reporters.

EMS, for instance, provides a News Center on its website with regularly updated links to news stories and to other services helpful to environmental journalists.

Among its own comparable efforts, Resource Media is proud of its On-Call Media Program, which will locate sources of information for reporters who call about a certain issue, even if it's not something the organization is specifically being funded to work on, Miller said.

He added that when he was a reporter, he liked calling on the organization because "they were honest brokers of information" on issues he inquired about.

"I said, 'I know you're working with the Sierra Club, but what about the opposition, and I always got suggestions."

Still, leaders at both EMS nor Resource Media are not shy about declaring where the organizations are located on the spectrum of environmental politics.

Schardt sees Bush 'threat to democracy'

"Bush is a threat to democracy," said Schardt, a former executive director of Environmental Defense, associate director of the ACLU and press secretary in Al Gore's 1987 presidential campaign.

Schardt added that since he recently returned to work, after several months' absence, he has rededicated himself "to generate understanding of (the Bush administration's) damage to public health and environment. We're a non-profit, but nobody can keep us from telling the truth."

Miller described Resource Media's work this way: "Our clients come from the conservation community, they're who we work with on message development. We have not been hired by the Bush administration to promote policy." Then he added with a small chuckle, "They probably wouldn't ask us, and we probably wouldn't accept."

The funding dilemma that ultimately prompted the split of the two organizations started to become a more pressing concern a couple of years ago, Schardt and Hyde Block said.

One problem, Schardt said, was that foundations that had already given to EMS in Washington were reluctant to make additional grants to what were by that time EMS's two West Coast offices in Seattle and San Francisco.

Northwestern funders, such as the environmentalist Bullitt and Brainerd foundations, were happy about the EMS presence in that region, but increasingly wanted their bequests to stay there, Hyde Block said.

"It became more and more obvious that though we under one roof, we were two different operations," she said.

"There was a dichotomy," Schardt said. "East Coast foundations were giving nationally, but West Coast foundations were not."

What was first considered an "experimental" step -- dividing EMS and EMS West -- "proved to be a good move for the two West Coast offices," he said.

Indeed, the firm now called Resource Media has expanded beyond its Seattle and San Francisco core offices, opening one-person offices in Denver, Portland, Ore., and Kalispell, Mont. The total staff, including full- and part-time employees, now numbers 15.

After grant funding declined for a time, EMS now has seven employees, which is less than half the highest staffing level that the Washington office once achieved, Schardt said.

"The whole PR industry in Washington declined by 20 to 25 percent after 9/11," he said, and not just organizations like his that represent "progressive" clients.

Nonetheless, Schardt expressed enthusiasm about the work EMS is doing now, such as its Science Communication Network, a year-old project funded by donors including the Beldon, Homeland, Park and Wallace Genetic foundations.

The aim, Schardt said, is to "combat the stealth attack on sound science" that supports environmental and public health measures. This effort has included helping scientists to publicize findings about toxic chemicals' adverse health effects and calling media attention to alleged "imbalance" in the federal scientific advisory panels.

In late July, another example of EMS's current activities was a Washington press event that called attention to Americans' transportation costs and to efforts in Congress to cut back on mass transit funding.

Initial focus on western energy, lands issues

Meanwhile, Resource Media is focusing much of its attention on energy and public lands issues in Western states –- such as forest politics and energy development proposals –- but with an eye to extending its work to other parts of the country, as well, Miller said.

"We don't see ourselves as strictly working on the West," he said. "We're anxious to help on issues anywhere."

Resource Media hopes to have its new website, www.resourcemedia.org, operational by Sept. 1. It will be different from the EMS website -- no regularly updated news links, for example -- but will still be "a valuable resource for our partners and for reporters," Miller pledged.

Other differences between the two organizations include Resource Media's decision not to provide regular breakfast briefings for reporters, as EMS became well-known among environmental reporters in Washington for producing.

Another difference, Hyde Block said, is that at Resource Media, Wwe tend not to outsource a lot," but rather to have staffers performing the great bulk of the work.

Outsourcing -- particularly contracting out some activities to the Washington PR firm Fenton Communications, which represents liberal and progressive causes -- is an EMS practice that has been used as a target by the two organizations' critics on the right over the years.

For instance, in 2000, Steven Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute and self-styled "Junkman" of the JunkScience.com website, wrote for FoxNews.com that EMS was an "affiliate of the notorious Fenton Communications -- the activist public relations firm behind numerous health scares including Alar in apples, silicone breast implants, and so-called 'endocrine disrupters.'"

Schardt described the EMS-Fenton relationship as simple and straightforward -- EMS leases its office space from Fenton and has often hired that firm to do things like calling reporters when EMS itself doesn't have enough staff members to stage particular press events.

"Yes, of course we use them," he said. "We do it because they're very good, they have very outstanding staff people. Obviously, we're going to go to them, we're not going to a firm that does PR for Monsanto."

Criticism of the EMS-Fenton connection peaked during the years when EMS was helping promote the 1996 book Our Stolen Future, about the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on humans and wildlife, he said.

In general, he added, "the thing that brings the critics out the most is environmental health issues."

People at Resource Media seem eager to dispel any possible inference that their organization's departure from EMS was related to the attacks that EMS -- and Schardt personally -- sometimes receive from conservative and industry-connected critics.

Hyde Block, who formerly worked at Fenton herself, said she has "profound respect" for Schardt. "Without his vision, there would be no Resource Media," Miller said. "We're in his debt. He conceived our basic plan of operation."