35 Journalists Honored by SEJ for Outstanding Work

The humidity seemed not so out-of-control, and the hurricane that within days trashed the North Carolina coast and much of the Atlantic seaboard stayed mercifully distant.

For some 607 registrants at the preliminary count, the Society of Environmental Journalists' (SEJ) annual conference September 10-14 provided an ample sampling of the Gulf Coast's diminishing coastline, the New Orleans-Baton Rouge "chemical corridor," and the region's abundant wetlands surrounded by risks and threats seemingly from all quarters.

Some 272 SEJ members, again at preliminary count, and by no means all of them "working press," registered for the meeting, a ratio of members-to-nonmembers that has come to be fairly standard for SEJ conferences. While the total of 600-plus registrants appears modest compared with the 850 who attended the Baltimore conference a year earlier, it too was more or less in keeping with most recent SEJ conference registrations.

SEJ members who attended the group's membership meeting heard that their organization now has a respectable 1,294 members: 884 active, 213 associate, 191 academic, and six honorary members. To the surprise of some, the group's membership growth in the past two years has come primarily in the active category, a growth attributed by some to the group's newly established annual reporting awards program. The associate and academic membership categories, by contrast, have remained static, and some on the SEJ board expressed an interest in trying to shore up those categories.

The group reported at its membership meeting that SEJ's financial picture remains generally favorable, notwithstanding difficulties facing many nonprofit organizations generally, and those in the journalism and journalism-education fields, in particular. The group reported that roughly 70 percent of its annual revenues come from foundations, with about 15 percent earned from membership and conference fees and a similar amount from partnerships, such as those involving universities supporting the annual conferences.

A special appeal for special contributions, issued by SEJ President Dan Fagin, Newsday, at a conference luncheon, reportedly netted more than $7,000 in contributions from those attending the meeting. Given that their conference expenses, in general, were higher than in past years, that contribution was fairly taken as a vote of confidence in the 13-year-old organization.

The conference itself got underway with what by most participants' accounts was a series of successful full-day and half-day tours. While there were the usual moans and groans associated with such an endeavor -- long days on the bus, information overload in some cases, too much of this/too little of that -- most of the tour-goers appeared well satisfied with their day's adventures and the conviviality and companionship they afforded.

The opening plenary on coverage of natural disasters may have provided most reporters with little or no hard news, although former Carter Administration Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) chief James Lee Witt may have "committed news" with the strength and vigor of his criticisms of the Bush Administration. A series of concurrent technical sessions, along with some good old-fashioned only-on-Bourbon-Street social festivities, rounded out the four-day meeting, which concluded with a small but enthusiastic post-conference tour that each year has SEJ conference planners wondering if it is holding again the next year.

The convention itself was bullish, as apparently was the mood of many of the working reporters and editors attending, notwithstanding their widespread recognition of the difficulties facing environmental reporters starved for more column inches and more air time.

Despite the continuing outstanding quality of some of the environmental coverage being done around the country (see Bill Dawson's column, this issue, and also the piece on the SEJ award winners), legitimate concerns about the state of the beat -- and the state of daily journalism generally -- appear widespread. At a prominent exhibit booth staffed by Crain Communications Television Week, a front-page "special edition" highlighted the tired cliche about environmental reporting as "an endangered species," reporting on "dwindling" TV reportage.

That may have been the reality beyond the conference. Within it, at least for those four days, the mood was decidedly more upbeat.