New EW Series to Explore Web Environmental Journalism

For six years, Editor Ed Hunt has been working to make the Tidepool website a morning habit for journalists, scientists, resource managers, elected officials and others who want to keep up with the Pacific Northwest's intertwined environmental and economic issues.

Hunt and colleagues are embarking on a new phase in the development of this influential publication by working to wean it from the financial support of its parent organization, the Portland-based environmental group Ecotrust.

With the launch of a new business plan this fall, Hunt wants to make Tidepool self-sustaining within two or three years.

Sustainability seems a fitting goal for a website started by Ecotrust. The group is devoted to building a "conservation economy" and fostering a sense of "bioregional" identity in what it calls the "Salmon Nation", the forested coastal region stretching from Alaska to Northern California.

Tidepool, in turn, presents itself as "News for Salmon Nation", a "news filter" where readers find a rich selection of web-linked summaries of articles from newspapers and other publications. They're organized under the categories of Environment, Community and Economy. (See related article.)

"A couple of readers have teased us that (the three) are all related," Hunt said. "We see them as interrelated. Ecotrust is different from a lot of environmental groups in that they see community and social capital and economy as integral to the health of the environment, and vice versa. I say we just report on the important stuff, and leave out the celebrity stuff and the car crashes."

Although Ecotrust is Tidepool's publisher, Hunt, a former newspaper reporter in Washington State, said he it isn't in any way an advocacy publication.

From the moment he became the first editor of the fledgling website, Hunt said he demanded "an editorial firewall" between Tidepool and its parent.

"I'm a journalist," he said. "I come from a news background. I told them up-front that I'm not writing press releases for them. They weren't asking me to."

Still, he acknowledged that "a lot of people are still confused about the (Tidepool-Ecotrust) relationship, six years down the road."

From Tidepool's start, "it's been a hard thing to explain to a lot of folks," he said. "I think funders that usually fund journalism projects are leery because our publisher is an environmental organization. Those that fund environmental organizations are leery of our independence."

The plan to separate the publication from Ecotrust's financial support has several facets.

Started with a grant from the Ford Foundation, Tidepool has operated with funds from Ecotrust and donations from readers. Hunt envisions a new business model akin to a public radio station's, with income from individual donors, underwriters' grants and fee-based services.

Recently, for instance, Tidepool received a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation, a Minnesota-based antipoverty organization. And this fall, the publication will begin promoting several fee-based services in earnest.

In this "Partners Program," Tidepool will offer services such as customized news feeds, derived from its ever-growing database. In one example, the nonprofit Wild Salmon Center is already paying Tidepool to provide automatically updated headlines to linked articles about salmon issues for the center's website. Before they appear on the Wild Salmon homepage, the articles were already collected and categorized for Tidepool's archive.

"It's a way to bring some revenue in for work we're doing anyway," Hunt said.

The searchable database upon which such services can be built is one key example of Tidepool's growth and evolution since its founding in 1997.

Author Richard Manning started Tidepool as a one-page collection of links to news articles that was essentially "a house organ" for Ecotrust, Hunt said. Manning later launched a news-filter website about the Rocky Mountain region called Headwaters (Environment Writer, May 1999). But before that, he and others at Ecotrust recognized that the nascent Tidepool had broader potential beyond being a service for the Ecotrust staff.

Hunt, then the salmon and science reporter for the weekly Chinook Observer in southwestern Washington, had written a few articles about Ecotrust's projects. Invited to helm an expanded Tidepool, he assumed the editor's job while, for a short time, he continued to work at the newspaper.

"I immediately saw there was a hunger for (Tidepool's) news beyond the internal Ecotrust thing," he said. "I worked to get it linked from other websites, broadened the scope and organized it. From one page that wasn't even organized, it's grown to a huge thing, with searchable databases and original content almost daily."

Two years later, in 1999, journalist Derek Reiber joined as managing editor. He and Hunt (who still comprise a full-time staff of two) divide the basic duties of selecting which articles to highlight from a regular list of regional and national publications.

Some of this culling and compiling starts in the afternoon before a new edition appears ("pre-tidepoolery," they call it), but mainly it's early morning work, starting about 4 a.m. Reiber handles it three days a week, and Hunt two days a week, producing Monday-Friday editions that are posted on the Internet by 9 a.m.

"If it's not up by 9, I get a dozen emails within 10 minutes," Hunt said.

In many ways, it's still a shoestring operation. Reiber works from his Portland home, while Hunt is based in a small town on the Washington coast. The two editors meet in person perhaps once a month. Otherwise, Hunt said, Tidepool is generated from "a virtual office."

"For a news junkie," he said, "it's a dream job. I created this publication as something I knew other journalists would use and would be useful."

That's something he intends to continue (along with free public access to the website), although Tidepool's new plan for generating income coincides with broader discussions about where it may lead.

"We've asked internally if Tidepool will still be linked to Ecotrust," Hunt said. "They're a proud parent, and I don't think Ecotrust will let Tidepool fully leave the nest. I imagine they'll keep on as our publisher. We might become more independent as we go on. It's hard to say what's in the future."

Also see: More on Tidepool.org