Strong Start, Strong Finish ... and Strong In Between

Wide-Ranging Advice Offered at SEJ Conference

SEJ Austin Conference: Impressions

by Bill Dawson

AUSTIN, TX. -- As usual, this year's annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists was brimming with professional advice available to be gleaned by those who attended.

Here's a selective sampling for journalists who didn't make it to the conference in Austin – and for those who were there, but didn't make it to the sessions where these comments were delivered.

One panel discussion that positively overflowed with practical tips – and may prove especially timely if American journalism enters a period of more aggressive reporting some hope for – was titled "FOIA Session: Fighting to Keep Public Information Public."

It was chaired by Ken Ward, environmental reporter for The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, who chairs SEJ's First Amendment Task Force.

One Environmental Protection Agency employee in attendance, noting that there is pressure from Washington to withhold documents sought by journalists, urged reporters to challenge all rejections of document requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, because some will inevitably lead to release of materials being requested.

Government officials often play a stalling game when they receive FOIA requests, Ward said, advising reporters to "out-wait and out-harass them."

A couple of panelists emphasized benefits of information that can be harvested by requesting and obtaining government email messages.

"Emails are our friends, they really are." said Jim Bruggers of the Louisville Courier-Journal. But he cautioned against too much hope once a request is filed: "Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't."

Vince Patton, environmental reporter for KGW-TV in Portland, Ore., said computers search-engine capabilities have opened the door to a new kind of open records request.

When asking for emails, he said, reporters can ask for any emails containing certain keywords, adding that tool to the more traditional categories used in framing FOIA requests.

Other advice in the same session included these recommendations:

• From Joe Davis, director of SEJ's WatchDog Project for freedom-of-information issues: Sources of useful information can include agency rosters of other FOIA requests, agency sign-in sheets for visitors, raw numbers from environmental sampling, and dam inspection reports.
• From Bruggers: Although he sometimes engages in random requests for documents to see what turns up, it's generally helpful for reporters to know what they're searching for and to be as specific as possible in describing requested documents.
• From Patton: A federal agency's rejection of a FOIA request may not mean it's time to give up that particular document hunt. Federal documents can be obtained from files at non-federal agencies, too.

At the conference's "FOIA Computer Workshop," participants got hands-on training in using databases, and also FOIA-related advice and information about a wealth of internet-based resources.

One piece of advice involved the filing of formal, written FOIA requests: Sometimes, the documents being sought will be forthcoming if a reporter simply asks for them.

On the email question discussed in the other FOIA session, workshop attendees were advised that agencies typically publish a "retention schedule" for deleting email messages, which can be useful information in itself.

SEJ maintains its own ample web pages with FOIA-related information. Other internet resources cited in the workshop include the websites of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Another tip at the session: Many offices of state attorneys general can be helpful in maneuvering through the open-records maze and overcoming obstacles in their states.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, mixed his advice for journalists with some criticism.

Pope was one of the panelists at one of the best-attended sessions that was not an all-conference gathering – a panel called "What's in a Name? Updates on Clear Skies, Healthy Forests and Others," moderated by Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin. A standing-room-only crowd that numbered close to 200 people crowded into a large room for the discussion.

Pope frequently and predictably disagreed on various issues with another panelist, House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, a property rights advocate and frequent target of environmentalist criticism. But Pope said he agreed with the California Republican that politicians can't win legislative approval for a proposal just because of a catchy, appealing name, such as "Clear Skies," the Bush administration's name for a major air quality initiative.

Still, Pope said journalists generally fail to do a very good job of going beyond this "name game," which he said politicians employ to "frame" debate on an issue and "define the playing field."

One signal failing of many reporters, according to Pope, is that they do not generally do a good job of "leveling the playing field" by conveying the substance of such proposals at the top of a story to offset the "Orwellian" language that political leaders use in granting appealing names to some proposals.

In a politically charged speech, replete with criticism of the Bush administration's environmental and public broadcasting policies, former CBS and PBS journalist Bill Moyers also offered some advice to environmental reporters about communicating with the nation's evangelical Christians.

Environmental journalists can help Evangelicals – many of whom may regard environmental reporting as "mechanistic, cold and godless" in its world-view – to look more clearly at the moral choices inherent in environmental issues, Moyers asserted.

While environmental journalism has typically been based on scientific language, many Evangelicals and Pentecostals often speak in a language that is more poetic, metaphorical and grounded in a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, he said.

Moyers suggested, offering one example, that an environmental journalist reporting about global warming might interview a minister willing to compare current-day environmental problems to the biblical story of Noah and the flood, thereby casting Noah as "the first great preservationist, preventing the first great extinction."

Even if some in the audience found such advice impractical or inappropriate for their own journalistic purposes, Moyers had more conventional pointers too.

In a question-and-answer session after his talk, he observed that all news stories ultimately are local.

In an increasingly internet-dominated system for disseminating news, in which even the smallest newspapers' websites make their articles available around the world, reporters should strive to make their stories "irresistible," helping them rise from a local audience to broader attention by the national media, he advised.

See other stories in this month's issue for additional reports from the SEJ annual conference.