ANYPLACE, USA, August YY, 20XX –Flash. This just in.

America’s last quality daily newspaper closed its doors today after acknowledging that it just wasn’t worth it anymore and saying the financial pressures, combined with the continuing “dumbing-down” of daily journalism, just made it “not fun” anymore.

The Daily Blither, long known for its commitment to place-based quality reportage, closed after 117 years of daily publication ….

You get the point. Will the last daily newspaper reader please turn out the lights?

It’s a story we’ll never see, never read. I hope. But it helps illustrate an increasingly important point: Love them as we may [or at least may have in times past], daily newspapers are not, repeat NOT, the only or even the most promising venue for quality journalism. On environment or anything else for that matter.

It’s a good thing too.

Writing in the July 1999 American Journalism Review, respected newspaper observer John Morton allows that, “I fear that something fundamental is happening to many American newspapers that ultimately could brand the industry not just as mature but as fading. Weekday circulation now is at essentially the same level as it was in 1955, yet national population has grown about 64 percent.”

Morton points to “a fundamental cause of the circulation malaise of the 1990s. The nature of newspaper ownership and management has changed dramatically in this decade. Newspapers, especially the smaller ones, are sold and swapped around us as so many economic units. Owning and operating a small-town daily no longer is as much a commitment as it used to be, when most were family properties. Now, these economic units are expected to perform as, well, economic units.”

Morton points to the irony that dailies today “are about as profitable as they have ever been, despite the circulation declines that many have suffered. Now is the time, when profits are up, to spend more on quality.”

But he isn’t confident that will happen.

Page two, as Paul Harvey might tease. Turn now to the August 1999 Brill’s Content, with its “Fearless Predictions: The Content World, 2005.”

Booz Allen & Hamilton media consultants Michael J. Wolf and Geoffrey Sands here offer a look at the media world a few years out, complete with the caveat that “predictions, like New Year’s resolutions, are often made but rarely come true.”

With that caveat, a sampling from their list:
1. A few major conglomerates will dominate the news business, each with TV, print, and Web outposts.
2. Local news stations will thrive, but only if they beef up coverage and have strong online offshoots.
4. Newspapers will be an endangered species unless they embarce the Web and ever-more targeted communities.
6. The number of magazines will; grow despite the glut of media and the rise of the Web.
8. The lines between editorial and advertising will blur more than ever.
(Editor’s Note: GULP!)

A little good news. Any port in a storm?

The July/August 1999 Columbia Journalism Review reports that “over the past few years, the increase in journalists’ earnings has outstripped those in most other occupations.” And the important context: “By no means are journalists getting rich. Many media companies continue to pay poorly, sometimes despite high profit margins. The absolute dollar gap between the incomes of journalists and people in other elite [?] professions, meanwhile, has actually been growing. The reason is simple: journalistic salary increases are coming off a lower base.”

Flash forward. Or is it sideways?

Economics writer Robert J. Samuelson, in a “The End of News” column in the June 18 Washington Post: “News isn’t what it used to be … it’s now hard to say what it is …. What to print or broadcast is increasingly determined by the lowest common demoninator,” and “commercial pressures also creep more into news judgments.” (See Reading Rack, this issue.)

Sure, readers have more choices today, Samuelson allows. But told his own career is secure because, “You’re safe – you’re content,” he writes:

“Content? And to think: Once I was a newsman.”

And another thing. Whether internet gossipist Matt Drudge ever was or is now a “newsman” may have been answered, at least to the liking of ABC Radio Networks, with his emergence as host of a nationally syndicated radio talkshow. Who cares if Drudge boasts an 80 percent accuracy rate – wouldn’t you? – and who cares either if the assignment came only over the vehement opposition of ABC News President David Westin.

Now, the next time a real reporter asks Matt Drudge “Are you a journalist?,” Drudge can simply respond: “Yes. ABC Radio thinks so.”

Public radio stations swapping donor lists with political parties and partisan activists, you say? The New York Times’ marketing research department soliciting readers of the newspaper to “learn more about your interests, lifestyles and how we can better serve you” – “FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY” of course? Even network news anchors shilling prime-time for their own network’s newsmagazine smasho/boffo upcoming scoop hours or days later?

But surely I digress.

The auto industry doing more to protect the environment than the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works???

Veteran environment watchers at the national level must wince.

Could it be? Could it possibly be?

The notion — not so outlandish as it once was — inspired a column in the June issue of Environment Writer. It inspired too questions about implications for environmental reporting, both at the national and at the local levels. For some insights, E.W. invited three veteran and respected former daily newspaper environmental reporters to offer some “wisdom” for their successors on the beat.

Tom Harris, now retired and enjoying life in Ben Lomond, north of Santa Cruz, California, covered environmental issues for more than 20 years, retiring from the Sacramento Bee in 1992. He is the author of Death in The Marsh (Island Press, 1991), detailing selenium poisoning of birds, fish, and other critters in the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

At the other end of the country, in upstate New York, environmental reporter Paul MacClennan at the Buffalo News found his own “story of a life time” in the landmark chemical contamination of Love Canal, in nearby Niagara Falls. He had covered environmental issues for the News since 1954. MacClennan officially retired in 1992 but continued a regular Sunday environmental column into the spring of 1998. He now publishes a green newsletter in the Buffalo area.

Phil Shabecoff for years covered environmental issues for The New York Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Shabecoff is the author of three books — A Fierce Green Fire:The American Environmental Movement (Hill & Wang, 1993) and of A New Name for Peace: International Environmentalism, Sustainable Development and Democracy (University Press of New England, 1996) and of the upcoming Transforming the Future: American Environmentalism in the 21st. Century (Island Press, Spring of 2000). He is the founding publisher of the daily Greenwire digest of media coverage of environmental issues. He now lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

Below, their individual “wisdom” for reporters now tilling the fields they had harvested so successfully for so long:

Tom Harris:

So, I get another 10-15 minutes of fame. Okay. Look out, Joe DiMaggio.

To the current tillers of the field:

Forget about all of the analysis;

Dump all the speculation;

No more whimpering and whining about play and air time.

You and what you do are indisputably, irrevocably, invaluably "in ... here, part of the game: a player." That's part of our legacy. So get on with it. Get off the couch. Find something interesting, and yes, important to say.

Go dig up a good story and dare your editor to ignore or bury it. Something different, unusual. Get out there in the field and SEE and smell and hear what is going on, how the laws and the policies are really working.

Take a look back, once in a while, to check how the system is working. Have the salmon come back? Is the air really cleaner, the drinking water purer? Are yesterday's sewage plant ready to go belly-up or has the technology ever gone beyond the primitive straining and aerating genre?

The Internet is an astounding tool but don't ignore the marshes and rivers and fields where our "canaries" live.

Finally, and this is from the heart, friends, if I got back on the carousel I hope it would be with enough personal courage and confidence to practice this very special craft without so much hunger for attention and validation.

You don't always have to be "outside and above the fold." Take your play where you get it. But get the stories out. Don't let down and don't you dare quit because you think the fad has faded.

Breathing clean air, drinking unpolluted water and eating untainted food are not electives .. and they sure as hell are not fads.

If things are better now, if Detroit is beginning to care more than politicians and bureaucrats, it's about time. Thirty years of the best education, activism and, yes, even environmental journalism that your predecessors could manage should have accomplished something.

That was our gift to you.

So, what will yours be?

Paul MacClennan:

My advice to young journalists aspiring to become environmental reporters -- Don't!

That is unless you are prepared to fight like hell -- not to get news but to get it in the paper. My adage as I developed the beat at The Buffalo News 35 years ago was "the politics of getting a story are far simpler than the politics of getting it into the newspaper." After I learned those lessons, along with having Love Canal crisis in our backyard, the beat bloomed.

Sadly the beat is gone today or as one colleague noted, "MacClennan retired and took the beat with him." It's gone at a lot of papers where editors ignore polls that show strong support for environmental issues. Perhaps the problem is that reporters no longer fight city hall or editors. The media, once proactive on the issue, have become reactive.

Speakers on a recent panel for the Society of Environmental Journalists provided a number of suggestions. You might try to get a tape of the discourse. I think one stealth attack is to find issues that impact people and then take the stories to various departments such as features, business, or even sports. Certainly the issues are there in every community. Another tactic: get the parties to request meetings with the editorial board to state their case and ask for better coverage at the highest levels of the paper and then see if it doesn't trickle down.

Environment is an all pervasive issue in the society, but you have to dig it out and tough it out against a lot of heavy odds at most papers. It's an issue that over 45 years I found worth fighting to put it on the paper's agenda. And I still fight. When the paper dropped the beat, a couple of us started an environmental newsletter to keep the issue alive.

Phil Shabecoff:

Supply a few words of wisdom to help younger environmental reporters think about covering the beat? Unfortunately, although I am now in my Medicare years, I am still waiting for wisdom to descend upon me.

Still, here are a few thoughts:

Don't be discouraged by ignorant, indifferent, or hostile editors. Remember that the enviroment is the most important beat there is: it is the matrix in which other issues — the economy, politics, health, geopolitics, and security — are embedded. Go after good, important stories and fight for them as much as your circumstances allow. Fight for space or air time. The public may be titillated by coverage of O.J. or Monica, but it urgently needs to know what is happening to the environment and what is or isn't being done about it.

While the nature of the environmental beat may be changing the basics of good reporting are not. Principles such as "follow the money" remain valid. If the automakers appear to be becoming environmentalists, it probably reflects a strategy to increase profits, not a sudden moral epiphany. Probe. If the U.S. Senate Environment Committee is not playing a key role in safeguarding our environment, it suggests that there is some fundamental reporting to be done about the direction of politics in the United States.

Finally, environmental reporters ought to have fun. There is no more interesting beat. It covers virtually every intellectual discipline imaginable, lets you meet people in every area of life, and can take you into all kinds of places, from Capitol Hill to City Hall to toxic waste dumps and wildlife sanctuaries. Enjoy it.

A series of five background documents detailing provisions of a new right-to-know regulatory program has been written by the National Safety Council’s Environmental Health Center (EHC), publisher of this newsletter, under a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The topical backgrounders focus on regulatory compliance, hazard assessment, working with chemical information, and chemical emergency management issues. Provided to media on the Environment Writer mailing list, the documents detail the Clean Air Act’s Section 112 Risk Management Program (RMP).

Under that program, more than 36,000 facilities using hazardous substances such as chlorine and ammonia were to submit worst-case and more likely chemical release and fire scenarios — along with estimates of potential injuries and deaths to nearby populations — by June 21, 1999. (See related article, p.8.) The RMPs also are to include a five-year history of the facility’s releases, its emergency response program, and its release prevention activities (See E.W. , April 1999).

The EHC backgrounders are intended to help citizens, the news media, state and local emergency response agencies, industry, and others better understand potential risks posed by chemicals in the community. Available for downloading from the NSC/EHC Web site at http://www.nsc.org/xroads.htm, the backgrounders can be ordered in printed versions by contacting the National Service Center for Environment Publications at (800) 490-9198 or by visiting http://www.epa.gov/ncephihom/orderpub.html. When ordering, specify the EPA document number mentioned below.

• Chemical Safety in Your Community: EPA’s New Risk Management Program EPA-550-B-99-010 (765KB).
  Provides an overview of the RMP and discusses key safety, compliance, and enforcement issues.
• New Ways to Prevent Chemical Incidents EPA-550-B-99-012 (681KB).
  The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments establish a new, multi-agency system to manage hazardous chemicals. This backgrounder explores the requirements and relationships among the RMP administered by EPA, the Process Safety Management (PSM) Rule administered by OSHA, and the activities of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
• How Safe Am I? Helping Communities Evaluate Chemical Risks EPA-550-B-99-013 (688KB).
  The RMP provides much of the basic information needed by government, industry, and the community to define acceptable levels of risk from hazardous substances. This backgrounder provides pointers and questions to identify and communicate risk.
• What Makes a Hazard Hazardous?: Working with Chemical Information EPA-550-B-99-014 (662KB).
  Chemical emergency management and the RMP revolve around public safety dangers posed by hazardous substances. This backgrounder explains the short-term health effects resulting from exposure to toxic and flammable materials.
• Evaluating Chemical Hazards in the Community: Using RMP’s Offsite Consequence Analysis EPA-550-B-99-015 (919KB)
  The Offsite Consequence Analysis (OCA) is the most critical and most controversial section of the RMP. This backgrounder describes the requirements and implications of the worst-case and alternative scenarios and suggests methods for effectively communicating their results.

What’s in your local drinking water?

Published reports and studies on drinking water quality during the past few years have often been conflicting, biased, unreliable — and difficult for reporters to assess accurately.

But consumers and journalists can now get an accurate picture of the quality of their drinking water — from their own water utilities and suppliers.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1996, right-to-know information in the form of an annual “Consumer Confidence Report” is now required annually from drinking water suppliers. Consumers are expected to receive the reports between now and October, and by July 1 each year thereafter.

“These reports will provide valuable information to customers of community water systems and allow them to make personal health-based decisions regarding their drinking water consumption,” according to the Federal Register notice announcing the rule.

And they will provide reporters with more extensive and reliable information than they have previously had access to.

Designed to be the centerpiece of public right-to-know in the Safe Drinking Water Act, these reports will be published in addition to the public notification that water systems must provide to their customers upon discovering any violation of a contaminant standard.

Each “consumer confidence report” must provide consumers with the following information about their drinking water:

• The lake, river, aquifer, or other source of the drinking water;
• A brief summary of the susceptibility to contamination of the local drinking water source, based on the source water assessments that states are completing over the next five years;
• How to get a copy of the water system’s complete source water assessment;
• The level of any contaminant found in local drinking water, as well as EPA’s health-based standard for comparison;
• The likely source of that contaminant in the local drinking water supply;
• The potential health effects of any contaminant detected in violation of an EPA health standard, and an accounting of the system’s actions to restore safe drinking water;
• The water system’s compliance with other drinking water-related rules;
• An educational statement for vulnerable populations about avoiding Cryptosporidium;
• Educational information about nitrate, arsenic, and lead in areas where these contaminants are detected above 50 percent of EPA’s standard; and
• Phone numbers of additional sources of information.

Through these additional references and sources, reporters can obtain more detailed information about source water assessments, health effects data, and information about the water system itself.

The new regulations cover 55,000 water systems which serve 248 million people across the country. Large water systems will mail the water quality reports to their customers, either with bills or as a separate mailing; the largest water systems must post their results on the Internet, in addition to informing consumers in other ways. Smaller water systems which serve fewer than 10,000 people may be able to distribute their information through newspapers or other means, and will get help from EPA in posting their results on the Internet.

According to EPA, water systems in California have already provided some of this information to consumers.

EPA is creating a local drinking water information page on its Web site, which will link to any electronically-available consumer confidence reports in each state. In addition, consumers will be able to find specific information about their local drinking water supply, including information about their state’s drinking water program and source water protection program.

EPA has also launched a public service announcement campaign to tell consumers to expect the new information, and is providing the ads to the media, drinking water community, and other interested groups. They include three 30-second radio spots, two of which are also in Spanish; two black-and-white print ads in three sizes, in English and Spanish; and posters.

More information about the reports and the Safe Drinking Water Act regulations is available on the Internet at http:// www.epa.gov/safewater or from the Safe Drinking Water Hotline at (800) 426-4791. The public service announcements are available on the Internet at http://www.epa.gov/safewater/psa.html.

With a name like Green Ink: An Introduction to Environmental Journalism, Michael Frome’s new paperback from the University of Utah Press is a natural for the shelf of any aspiring or even veteran environmental journalist, let alone for any academic plying the trade.

But journalists and other close readers should be mindful that in providing a broad “introduction,” Frome in fact offers up his case for what he describes in the preface as “a different kind of journalism, advocacy journalism in behalf of the environment, yet hewing to basic principles of literacy, accuracy, fairness, and meeting the deadline.”

A veteran chronicler of environmental issues with a clear and unblemished bent for the “green” mission of his writing, Frome practices and advocates precisely the kind of journalism that gives more traditional journalists a reputation for being advocates and not just reporters. Frome makes that clear in his preface, for those who choose to read it closely:

“Advocacy is a word we have been taught to avoid. It marks a bias, something most journalists are convinced should not be acknowledged, despite the fact that it is inescapable. But my point is that we ought to be advocates for the health and safety of the planet, professionally and personally concerned with global warming, acid rain, destruction of tropical and temperate forests, loss of wilderness and wildlife, toxic waste, pollution of air and water, and population pressures that degrade the quality of life.”

Frome tries, whether successfully or not must rest with each reader, to “face and resolve the question of ‘objectivity.’” He gives voice to a definition of environmental journalism as “writing with a purpose, designed to present the public with sound, accurate data as the basis of informed participation in the process of decision making on environmental issues.”

But despite that journalism-303-sounding media-and-democracy classroom definition, he acknowledges that his approach “is not the way it works in ‘mainstream’ or ‘conventional’ journalism,” where, he says, environmental journalism “continues to suffer under the delusion that objectivity is being maintained.”

In example after example, Frome points to an array of liberal and progressive sources to document and justify the need for advocacy journalism, acknowledging it as “anathema” for many mainstream media and journalism schools.

For finding story ideas, Frome suggests that writer-wannabes “build your contacts as a volunteer” by working, for instance, as volunteers on local Audubon or Sierra Club media projects or for those group’s newsletters. “It is a way to learn the issues, contribute constructively, see your work in print, and build contacts and confidence,” he writes. More Frome advice: “Read everything” and “Look to your models, who show how to write with clarity and authority, who shape ideas into timely and tireless writing, provocative, with strong voice and viewpoint.”

Through his decades of personal experiences as both a writer and a university lecturer – including an arguably self-serving description of his 1971 “censorship” as a columnist for the American Forestry Association’s American Forests – Frome offers readers a tempting, if not broad, overview of green, as in advocacy, journalism. Teachers and students sampling his offering should do so with a firm understanding that his indeed is a “different” kind of journalism from what the black-ink journalists of an earlier day might still long for.

In that sense, it’s not so much an introduction to environmental journalism, as the subtitle suggests. Rather, Frome’s is a bugle call for a kind of advocacy writing achievable only long after the fundamentals of news writing and of environmental protection have been well mastered. And then only for publications and columns and vehicles clearly identified as advocacy.

Green Ink: An Introduction to Environmental Journalism, Michael Frome, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, copyright 1998, 204 pages in paperback (ISBN 0-87480-582-1).

On August 5, 1999, President Clinton signed into law legislation (S 880) imposing a one-year moratorium on disclosure of worst-case or “offsite consequence analysis” information concerning potential harm to health and communities from plants handling hazardous chemicals.

A provision in the 1990 Clean Air Act, as amended, required tens of thousands of industrial plants to develop risk management plans (RMPs) outlining potential risks to communities from chemical hazards on their sites. Those plans are to be available to state officials, local fire fighters, the public and the media in anticipation that the general “light of day” disclosures themselves would prompt safer plant operations.

As the June 1999 regulatory deadline for disclosure neared, the chemical industry raised fears of terrorism and of terrorists targeting the most vulnerable communities (see E.W., April 1999). Environmentalists countered that the industry was more concerned with hiding dangers than with trying to correct them.

The new law:

• exempts propane dealers from having to comply, on grounds that existing laws and regulations are adequate;
• exempts Freedom of Information Act disclosure of offsite consequence analysis (OCA) information for one year, and also exempts rankings of sites based on that data;
• requires that the President (not EPA) adopt OCA information dissemination rules applicable after the one-year moratorium, with risks of terrorism and incentives for plants to reduce inherent risks fully considered.

The regulations to be adopted must “allow access by any member of the public to paper copies” of OCA information on a “limited number” of plants anywhere in the United States, and also allow “other public access … as appropriate.” State and local officials could get OCA information on sites beyond their immediate area with approval from EPA.

Within 180 days of enactment, larger covered facilities are to hold public meetings describing local risks and providing a “summary” of their OCA information. EPA, within 180 days of enactment, is to develop a system providing OCA information to “qualified researchers,” but data would be provided solely in a “read-only” technology in order to encourage electronic distribution. That provision applies to researchers “from industry or any public interest group,” but does not mention media.

Government officials could face criminal penalties for making OCA information available unlawfully.

Since industries on June 23 reported their RMP information to EPA, the agency has received more than a dozen FOIA requests for that information, some of them from news media.

Stever Fehr of the Washington Post said his paper had identified some 500 covered facilities in the metropolitan area and had sought information on about 20 of them. EPA officials waited for guidance from Congress before responding to that request.

Kevin Carmody of the Chicago Daily Southtown, which had editorialized against the one-year disclosure ban, had FOIAed the agency for data on all facilities in Illinois.

“Our circulation area, which includes the South Side of Chicago, is very heavy with industries that we know have the potential to cause serious harm,” Carmody said. “It’s important information for our readers.”

Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.