This piece reports on comments made by 2006 Grantham Prize winners at the September 25 prize ceremony event held at the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting, in Narragansett, R.I. Metcalf is the publisher of Environment Writer.

"Print environmental journalists have a place in this world. I'm not sure broadcast environmental journalists do .... I'm always envious of print reporters going about doing their jobs while I am fiddling with cameras and lighting."

The speaker was John Sherman, of WBAL-TV, accepting a $5,000 Award of Special Merit for his 2005 work on a corporate polluter menacing the Chesapeake Bay. Sherman, along with Betsy Kolbert of The New Yorker and Douglass Fischer of the Oakland Tribune shared an awards ceremony platform with the Grantham Prize $75,000 winner – the Bergen Record, of New Jersey, for its landmark "Toxic Legacy" series.

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Emphasizing the importance of TV reporters' having a "visual story" to get on the air, Sherman emphasized, "If you can't see it, it's not there." In his case, Sherman said he benefited also because his initial seven-minute segment (7 minutes out of a total 22 in a half-hour news program - "unheard of") had the classic "good guy/bad guy" elements. On the air, his programming made especially effective use of awkward silences from the owner of the implicated company, which eventually was forced to shut down.

Speaking of his "A Body's Burden: Our Chemical Legacy" series in the Oakland Tribune, Fischer described his piece as "an experiment." It was one that "took five years off my life," he joked.

The Tribune's award-winning piece involved impaneling, and paying for, an institutional review board to oversee ethical issues involved with the testing of a sample family featured in his work. The testing involved taking 160 CCs of blood from adult family members and smaller amounts from two children, along with testing urine samples. His work also involved analyzing the chemical contents of the family's refrigerator. Test results showed surprisingly high levels of flame retardant chemicals in the children's blood.

Fischer worked six to nine months full-time on the project, with another six months involved in pursuing successful publication of a peer-reviewed journal piece on the work. The paper paid about $14,000 for the initial lab tests and another $2,200 for follow-up analyses, he said.

"I didn't know that I didn't know my data," Fischer replied when asked by a radio reporter what lessons he might draw from his reporting experience. "The bottom line is that we still don't know the effects" on health of those high concentrations. "It's very frustrating," and it raised for him and his editor the journalistic challenge of informing without unduly alarming his audience.

That same challenge confronted Kolbert in her seminal "The Climate of Man" three-part series on climate change in The New Yorker, said Grantham Prize Juror Dennis Bueckert of Canadian Press in Ottawa.

"How do you deal with alarming news without using alarmist language?" Bueckert asked. He said Kolbert did so by introducing readers to involved scientists, exposing their personalities. That approach helped Kolbert "soften the blow ... for people who may have 'disaster overload,'" said Bueckert. Her approach was "never shrill or hectoring, but the evidence accumulates" on the science surrounding and the seriousness of the climate change issue.

Introducing the $75,000-Prize winner Record reporting team, Grantham Juror David Boardman, executive editor of The Seattle Times, said the "Toxic Legacy" series illustrates that "good business and good journalism can go hand in hand." He said the Record pursued the story "because it's the right thing to do" and the paper recognized "a greater responsibility beyond the profit record."

The Record's series dealt with extensive pollution contamination left from a Ford Motor Company manufacturing and assembly facility. "The wages of our past sins are coming due," editor Tim Nostrand said in accepting the Prize, "and the wages of our current ones will come due."

With its organized mob connections exposed, Nostrand cautioned the public not to simply think "that Tony Soprano [of the HBO series "The Sopranos"] is cute."

Saying the story involved "a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of support," Nostrand said the story "connected with the readers," providing winners and losers, villains and victims, and opportunities lost. Record Editor Frank Scandale called the series "a labor of love," one that he said underscores the importance of editors' leaving their comfortable offices and physically going to the actual scene of the story so they can better understand it.

"Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty," Scandale advised other editors. "And I mean that literally .... Think visually from the get-go."

Reporter Alex Nussbaum, one member of a nine-member reporting team and numerous other staffers, at one point characterized the series as "Erin Brokovich meets The Sopranos ... with Indians," a reference to native American tribes living near and affected by the chemical contamination. Nussbaum said he was surprised, during his reporting, to learn "how much is really hidden in plain sight" via government records and other official and unofficial documentation.

Nussbaum said the paper was particularly proud that their reporting relied on only one unidentified source, a trucker. He said the reporters may have benefited from what he called "a convenient fantasy ... people actually wanted to tell their stories" about the contamination and the plant that created it before closing the site some 25 years ago.

Characterizing the series' widely acclaimed web site, the Record team said "we basically did a wholesale embrace of video" and the web.