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SEJ Pittsburgh Meeting Attracts More than 325 Journalists, Students by Bud Ward and Bill Dawson
More than 325 journalists and journalism students traveled to Pittsburgh September 20-24 for the Society of Environmental Journalists' (SEJ) 14th annual conference, and it seems that few left disappointed with the rich smorgasbord of activities afforded them.
From a wide range of full- and half-day field trips to a cash-bar reception at the extraordinary Carnegie Museum of Natural History ...
From the political fireworks of environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the engaging and warm on-stage style of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Levitt ...
To a last-minute drop-in by then-First Lady wannabe Teresa Heinz Kerry and a "science and politics" closing plenary session that may actually have generated some legitimate news stories ...
The packed four-day agenda again this year provided the attending journalists plenty of story ideas, new contacts, renewed friendships and acquaintances, and rejuvenated energy to go back and confront the inevitable challenges of a shrinking news hole and fewer newsroom jobs.
For the even larger number of non-journalism participants who swelled the total conference registration to roughly 718, the conference afforded a first-hand glimpse at how some journalists view their beat and how they cover it in a challenging news climate generally inhospitable to substantial serious environmental coverage.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette environment reporter conference chair Don Hopey could only have been thrilled with the birthday presents he received: a highly successful conference and numerous rave reviews from first-time Pittsburgh visitors who had had no idea of the city's architectural treasures, frequent river vistas, and old-world European-style charm. His conference risked being remembered by journalism attendees largely for the storm brewed by the rousing reception given Kennedy (see Just Thinking, this issue), but in its entirety, the 2004 conference provided a wide array of images and memories, prompting some to already look forward to next year's SEJ conference, September 28-October 2 meeting in Austin, Tx.:
ITEM: SEJ's board, as always voting behind closed doors to select the next SEJ officers from among its members, stuck with SEJ tradition: The newly chosen SEJ president over the next two years will be Perry Beeman of the Des Moines Register. That selection continues the tradition of having a traditional newspaper reporter as SEJ president, and not a broadcast, magazine, internet, or free-lance reporter.
ITEM: SEJ's Executive Director, Beth Parke, reported that total SEJ membership now exceeds 1,500, including some "dead beats" soon to be dropped unless they pay-up overdue membership dues. Parke reported that the group has more than 950 "active" members to go along with some 250 academic and roughly 200 associate members. She reported that the group's financial status generally is quite stable and healthy.
ITEM: The group"s third annual environmental journalism awards program attracted 253 contest entries. The outstanding coverage $1,000 prize winners:
SEJ announced it had received so few entries for television reporting that it will reshape its membership categories for next year's contests, dropping that category.
ITEM: A concluding plenary panel on "Science and Politics" brought together top EPA and Energy Department research officials, President Clinton's science advisor, and 1970s EPA Administrator Russell E. Train, a Republican appointee. Moderated by NPR "Science Friday" Host Ira Flatow, the panel also involved New York Times senior science reporter, and former science editor, Cornelia Dean.
The EPA and Energy Department political appointees, not surprisingly, denied any awareness of political interference with their program's science. But Train, now chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund, said the Bush administration "has gone further out in the direction of interfering with agency decisionmaking" than he finds comfortable.
To some observers, the panel's discussion on climate change science was over-simplified by Flatow's apparent resolve to make signing of the Kyoto Protocol the single criterion in evaluating a country's attitude toward climate change.
On the other hand, reporter Dean's comments focusing on what she sees as the growing, and troubling, influence of religiosity on science appeared to open new avenues for reporters able to pursue the idea. Whether reporters will take that bait remains unclear.
ITEM: EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt appeared to many to be affable and approachable – likeable even – in his Friday morning keynote address (one of two sessions billed by SEJ as "keynotes," along with Kennedy's Thursday night presentation).
Without necessarily addressing questions posed to him in any depth, Leavitt nonetheless impressed some with his professed open-door invitation to any reporter willing to spend several days at agency headquarters coming to grips with what Leavitt characterized as the extraordinarily complex mercury air emissions decision expected to be made in early 2005. Literally begging the audience to ask him about the pending mercury rule-making, Leavitt urged interested reporters to take up his invitation to sit in on key scientific briefings he expects to hear. Here too, it remains to be seen if any reporter takes up this invitation. But if none do, the media clearly will have set themselves up to be criticized for misunderstanding the issue, from Leavitt's perspective.
ITEM: For reporters whose editors and news organizations will give them the space to address it: A lightly attended Saturday morning concurrent session shined a spotlight on challenges facing environmental law clinics at a number of law schools across the country. The point emphasized by panelists here: many of these clinics face stiff challenges from critics, including those from within their colleges, opposed to their activism.
In state-supported schools, the financial and other pressures can be particularly daunting, with some complaints that the clinics are opposing state-supported initiatives. "These days, the clinics are spending more and more time defending another endangered species: themselves," panel moderator Terry Carter wrote in a July 2002 ABA Journal article. Is there a local clinic story in your area?
ITEM: A good number of environmental journalists (well, just about all types of journalists) have been known to complain once in awhile that their editors don't think the subjects they cover are as important as they do. One of the conference's network lunch discussions – titled "Future of Environmental Reporting" – provided hope that news supervisors can be persuaded of the importance of in-depth, issue-based environmental reporting.
Chris Bowman, one of three Sacramento Bee environmental reporters, introduced his boss, Bee executive editor Rick Rodriguez, as someone who had been a strong skeptic about environmental reporting. But Rodriguez said he has evolved into an editor who wants his newspaper "to lead the way, the help set the agenda for new environmental coverage in the West."
In years past, some environmental journalists often seemed more concerned with the plight of wildlife than with the plight of people, Rodriguez said. He said he also thought that some reporters on the beat once approached their jobs with an attitude that "everybody who worked for an environmental organization was a white hat and everybody that didn't was on the other side." This is neither the "right professional approach" nor the "right journalistic approach," he said.
At the Bee, environmental reporting has moved beyond "good guys and bad guys" to concentrate on close examinations of issues, Rodriguez said. Good investigative journalism that relates to people and is aimed at helping their communities will convince editors at other news organizations that environmental reporting is important, he said.
Rodriguez will be in a particularly influential position to communicate that viewpoint starting next April. That's when he begins a term as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The theme of his presidency will be "Unleasing the Watchdog," he said, noting that too much time is spent at newspapers on "the warm and fuzzies of journalism," and not enough on the "unique content" that can set newspapers apart – investigations that will improve communities.
ITEM: Anyone who hasn't been paying attention to SEJ's WatchDog TipSheet got an opportunity at the conference to take a crash course on its subject matter – the ways that 9/11-inspired security concerns are diminishing environmental journalists' access to public information previously available to them.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told attendees of the panel titled "Freedom's Just Another Word ... FOIA and 9/11" that environmental reporters are at the "frontline" of journalists' need for government information – and of governmental actions to withhold information. "These are very scary times for anyone concerned with open government and the public's right to know," she said.
Sean Moulton, a senior analyst at the government watchdog group OMB Watch, agreed. Homeland security concerns, while certainly justified, have become the biggest threat to free access to governmental information in years, with administrative actions, legislation and court decisions all playing roles in the information-withholding trend, he said.
Elizabeth Withnell, counsel in the privacy office of the Department of Homeland Security, said there may be a "purposeful" effort to withhold information from reporters at some agencies, but not at DHS. With only a tiny staff devoted to Freedom of Information Act requests, it's hard for the Homeland Security agency to meet FOIA deadlines regularly, she said, adding that it isn't fair to say that the resulting delays are part of an effort to withhold information.
Withnell offered some advice to reporters: It's easier to get information with a carefully tailored inquiry. "Definitely craft your request to specify what you want," she said.
Those attending the FOIA panel discussion also heard about online resources for learning about and keeping up with the rapidly changing arena – a Homefront Confidential white paper and Behind the Homefront blog at the Reporters Committee's website, as well as the Information and Access page at OMB Watch's website.
ITEM: Fish is good for you. Mercury can be bad for you. Fish consumption is the main pathway for mercury exposure in the U.S. population. But how much fish is too much when it comes to mercury? Folks at the SEJ conference who got their hair tested for mercury will be receiving a report about the study that includes analysis of the overall findings and their own individual results, plus links to dietary guidelines.
For the time being, though, preliminary results have been posted at the website of PennFuture, an advocacy group that collaborated on the study with the Harvard School of Public Health. Of the 205 individual results posted there (with numbers, no names, to identify the participants), 55 were higher than the mercury concentration that is approximately equal to the EPA's "reference dose" for mercury consumption – the lifetime exposure rate that the agency says "should result in low risk of adverse health effects."
Many of the 55 were only slightly above that guideline, though one was 10 times the reference dose.
ITEM: SEJ's freelance membership has expanded over the last six years by about 50 percent, reaching a total of 289 at the start of November. Any residual doubts about the significance of that contingent in the SEJ universe were probably erased for those who stepped into the standing-room panel discussion "Focus on Freelancing: Meet the Editors." Dozens of people crowded into the room to hear nuts-and bolts advice from editors at three magazines – American Forests, Audubon and National Geographic.
There were a lot of useful tips of the sort that many freelancers hunger for, both on what to do and what to avoid.
For instance, Jennifer Bogo of Audubon said its content "ultimately comes down to wildlife and habitat" – a not-too-surprising piece of advice. But she elaborated with some less-obvious pointers for writers who want to pitch ideas to the magazine.
Audubon wants articles that examine the people's "daily decisions" that affect the environment, she said. Recent examples include stories on shade-grown coffee and community-supported agricultural practices on family farms that are friendlier to wildlife and that enhance biodiversity.
A good tactic for freelancers who want to write for Audubon is to think seasonally, Bogo said, because the magazine has been gearing more articles to season-related themes, such as one in September on hummingbird migration.
Dennis Dimick of National Geographic made plain that it is "not an environmental magazine, per se." He said the rise in the percentage of its circulation among readers outside the United States significantly affects the stories it will commission on U.S. environmental policy issues.
"In general you need to keep in mind what we do," which includes a wide range of topics such as archaeology, the history of civilization, geology and dinosaurs, he said. In such a broad mix, articles on environmental issues add up to only about 5 or 6 percent of the total.
In those that are commissioned, National Geographic wants stories that people don't already know about, Dimick said, as well as articles that provide "contextual background" to help readers understand news events more fully.
Often, writers submit proposals that are "too small in scale," he said. And freelancers need to "think visually and write visually," given the magazine's heavy emphasis on photography and graphics.
Michelle Robbins of American Forests, the quarterly magazine of the non-profit conservation group of the same name, described it as a "niche" publication. Robbins said she gets a lot of pitches on recreation-related topics, even though American Forests does not generally publish such articles.
The magazine does publish a lot of stories on animals, particularly endangered species, that are framed in the context of their forest habitat. Other typical story topics include wildfire and stewardship forestry projects, Robbins said.
ITEM: Even the most hard-nosed reporter had to feel a little bit for the dozen-and-a-half or so EPA regional public information officers whose Saturday 8 a.m. "Cheerios and PIOs" breakfast in the [aptly named?] General Motors Dining Room ended up having to just talk primarily among themselves.
Reporters simply didn't take the bait of "a candid roundtable discussion about the agency" ... "on the eve of this major election."
Whether it was Corn flakes, Cheerios, Fruit Loops, or lemme-outta-here/anywhere-but-there, the flacks, as they're not so affectionately known to many reoporters, dined on their own. It's not that somewhat embarrassed conference organizers didn't beat the drums seeking someone, anyone, to go keep them company.
It's just that other fare – including no fare at all – won out over the chance to munch Saturday breakfast with the EPA press officers.
Wondering "what if they threw a party, and no one came?"
Now you know. No one did.
November 2004
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