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By Bill Dawson

Gary Strieker's persistence and ingenuity are paying off as he pursues the ambitious objectives of Environment News Trust, the nonprofit organization he founded when he left CNN at the end of 2003.

Strieker is the executive director and lead correspondent for the video journalism enterprise.

In an interview with Environment Writer, he summed up its mission this way: "I want to get environmental reporting back on TV, to make people more informed and aware, and to do it as objectively as we can."

In March, Strieker began webcasting a series of four-minute environmental stories under the "Assignment Earth" brand through the video page of Yahoo! News.

So far, 18 "Assignment Earth" stories have been made available for online viewing. The most recent ones examined research on timber rattlesnakes in Tennessee, a controversy in Utah over federal lands, scientists' efforts to track loggerhead turtles in North Carolina, and a battle over a Canadian mining company's plans in Alaska.

"Basically, we're the environmental channel for Yahoo!," Strieker said. "Assignment Earth" is listed along with other Yahoo! video news sources such as CNN, ABC, AP and Reuters.

When the Yahoo! stories began, Environment News Trust already was providing Strieker's reports to NBC News Channel, which makes them available to NBC's affiliate stations. Several dozen of these stations have been broadcasting the stories on their local news programs.

Recently, Strieker said, he signed a deal to provide a monthly half-hour environmental program to Al-Jazeera International, the planned English-language affiliate of the Qatar-based news network.

He's also started work on a new series for PBS, an offshoot of his NBC programming to be called "This American Land," which will comprise "interstitial" stories of two to four minutes each.

These PBS pieces, like his other work, will be "straight news stories, with balanced reporting," Strieker said.

Meanwhile, he has also been trying to assemble a team of freelance video journalists, based in the U.S. and overseas, to join him in pursuing the expanding work of Environment News Trust.

"I hope to have a dozen worldwide and a half-dozen in the U.S. contributing stories," he said.

Strieker was CNN's correspondent and bureau chief in Kenya before becoming the network's global environmental correspondent in 1995.

When CNN abandoned its once-heralded environmental programming, including Strieker's "Our Planet" show, he was offered the opportunity to stay with the network as a general assignment reporter.

"I wanted to continue on the environment beat," he said, so he left CNN after 19 years with the network.

"The whole concept of setting up a nonprofit was that the only way to get (environmental reporting) on the air was for civil society to subsidize it," he said.

"Foundations went for it," he said, "and in the last two and a half years, we've shown what we can do."

The path for Environment News Trust has not always been smooth, however. Strieker thought the nonprofit's reports would air regularly on CNN, and he was indeed able to get a good number of them on the network in the first year or so.

But then "Next@CNN" – a weekly science-space-technology-environment show and successor to CNN's 1993-2001 environment program, "Earth Matters" – was cancelled in 2005.

"They don't cover news like they used to," Strieker remarked about his former network.

CNN founder (and environmental advocate) Ted Turner's Turner Foundation has been one of the funders for Environment News Trust. At CNN's 25th anniversary celebration last year, Turner said he'd like to see more environmental coverage on the network he once ran.