The health of the environment beat is a hard-to-define, hard-to-measure quality, but understandably a perennial concern for environmental journalists.

That's been especially true during the past couple of years, as media and public attention have been focused on a string of extraordinary news events that began with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and continued through this fall with the lingering conflict in Iraq and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California.

Earlier this year, Environment Writer examined the state of the beat as it was perceived from the vantage point of reporters and academics (EW, May 2003).

For a different perspective, here are the views of several public relations specialists who seek to initiate and influence environmental coverage:

Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Washington-based Clean Air Trust, is a frequently-quoted commenter on legislative and policy developments in the air pollution field. A former reporter, O'Donnell knows that media interest in these subjects "comes and goes in trends," based, to a large extent, on "external events."

He believes an overall decline in media interest in the environment started with 9/11. "Some of it swung back about a year later, but then it swerved again with the Iraq War," he said.

"We're in a limbo phase now," he added, as many journalists increasingly view environmental developments through the "somewhat different prism" of the next year's impending national election.

"I hear frustration from reporters about their inability to even get their papers to take stuff" on air issues, he said.

O'Donnell acknowledged that this, in turn, translates into frustration for him, as he offers news tips hoping they will generate the degree of coverage he'd like to see.

"I do get frustrated at times, but I don't lose sight of the fact that the process is difficult, it's often hit-and-miss," he said. "There are a lot of intangibles that boil down to individual reporter interest, aggressiveness, and feedback and signals from above."

One recent factor that has made his job tougher, O'Donnell said, is the numerous staffing changes on environmental assignments at leading news organizations.

"At the Washington Post in particular, on air issues, I've probably seen five to six people covering environment change beats over the last half-dozen years. It's remarkable. It makes it tougher for the paper when changes are made so often on a topic where it's useful to have background," he said.

"At the New York Times, tell me who's the environment writer. They have very talented people, but they get moved around."

A similar observation was offered by Frank Maisano, a Washington-based spokesman for industry organizations including the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council (representing coal-burning utilities) and the Oxygenated Fuels Association (representing MTBE makers).

Staffing on the environment beat "seems to change at the major papers so much," he said. "At the New York Times and Washington Post, they have a different person doing environment all the time. It's hard to find a beat specialist nowadays."

For the environmental PR professional, this practice "makes it harder to find who you need to find," Maisano said.

As an industry spokesman, he regards each issue he works on as "an economic story, which lots of times has local impact," but he doesn't always see that angle reflected in news articles.

Journalists assigned to environmental stories, but who don't cover environmental issues on a regular basis, are often "subject to the whims of environmental groups," he asserted. As a result, they produce stories that "tend to lean more toward the environment than the economy."

Such reporters "really need to determine and give fair credit to both issues," he said.

Scott Miller, a former television reporter and now a publicist for environmentalists in Seattle, said he believes the importance of "part-time environmental reporting" is often overlooked by PR people who specialize in environmental issues, as well as by professional organizations such as the Society of Environmental Journalists.

"I'm convinced that there's a lot of de facto environmental coverage, especially in the electronic media, by people who will never be called environmental reporters," said Miller, who held the environment beat at Seattle's KING-TV from 1988-2002. Now, he is co-director of Resource Media, a nonprofit communication firm that works with environmental advocacy groups in the West.

"There's not just a news-cycle rationale for the decline of beat reporting, but economic factors, too," he said. "Environmental reporting is not as simple. Those pitching environmental stories need to be very persistent and creative about getting people's attention. They need to expand their attention to others -- health reporters, general assignment reporters. They've got to understand what's going on in the industry."

To say there has been a "downturn" in environmental reporting in the past year or so "implies a trend I can't document," Miller said.

Even at the height of the war in Iraq, Resource Media was able to inspire coverage of a draft Environmental Impact Statement on a change in federal forest rules by preparing a tip sheet for reporters weeks in advance, which explained the broader context for the rule changes and provided examples of individual timber sales, he said.

The larger lesson, he said, is that "international events do not obliterate local coverage. There's always a news hole for local stories."

The challenge for environmental PR specialists is to "make sure reporters know about stories, let them know in a very saleable way that they're worthwhile, worth column inches or time."

At the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded, free-market think tank in Washington that focuses much attention on environmental issues, staff members observed "a big dropoff" in coverage of such topics after the 9/11 attacks, said Richard Morrison, the group's director of media relations.

Although some environmental reporters for "elite" media outlets were reassigned, most seem to have "drifted back into mostly environmental coverage," Morrison said. "It's hard to say whether there are as many people (assigned to the environmental beat) because some split their time among several subjects."

Attending the SEJ conference this past September in New Orleans, however, he got the impression that a number of participants think the beat hasn't rebounded completely to pre-9/11 staffing levels.

"I've had a sense that it's more local coverage that's been suffering," that environment is "seen, if not as a luxury, then as a marginal beat. If you're downsizing, you take the person who covers the environment."

Except in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, there does not seem to have been a broad trend of less media attention to CEI's own environment-related activities and publications, Morrison said.

With the Bush administration in office, "there has been an assumption that free-market groups like CEI would probably be more influential," so "a fair amount of people have been quoting CEI."

Still, getting the group's viewpoint into the public domain can be challenging, especially in shorter stories that often "break down to pro and con," he said.

Reporters sometimes have a tendency "to define an issue as just two sides -- a quote from a presidential speech, a quote from an environmental coalition, and that's the story," he said.

"Sometimes, for groups like CEI that offer a different take, it's difficult to get our point of view in. We've criticized the Bush administration on any number of issues. We've tried to posit a third way." Unlike some multi-function organizations in the environmentalist camp, the Environmental Working Group focuses exclusively on producing research-intensive, data-heavy reports, then publicizing them in hopes of generating news coverage about the often-complex findings.

Bill Walker, the group's Oakland-based California director, saidi he believes the environment beat in that region is "in good shape," at least at newspapers.

The West Coast is one place "where readership surveys show a desire for environmental reporters," said Walker, who was a newspaper reporter before becoming a professional environmental activist in 1990. He worked for Greenpeace and the California League of Conservation Voters before joining EWG.

"There are a lot of (newspaper) reporters who have been on the beat a long time" in the region, he said, ticking off a few prominent names -- Marla Cone at the Los Angeles Times, Jane Kay at the San Francisco Chronicle, and Chris Bowman at the Sacramento Bee.

"It doesn't feel like there has been much drop-off in interest by large West Coast newspapers," he said, but quickly added that television journalism in the region is a different story.

"It was never likely that you'd get a reporter at a TV station who was able to specialize in the environment," he said. "There were a number who kept up (with environmental issues) regularly, but (television coverage) seems more and more superficial each year."