If news is supposed to be what's new and interesting, how come so much of the environmental journalism in the national media is just the Same Old Story? SOS!

Maybe that's a rhetorical question. Of course, most reporters are overworked, underpaid, cut back, over-budget, and behind schedule. Who can do the best work under those conditions?

But even the easy stories have gotten to be predictable. More and more, the diet of environmental "news" we see on national networks, cable, local TV, and even major print dailies, seems to consist largely of clichés -- stories that have been done too many times before.

It's a sign that something's wrong. SOS: It's getting to be a crisis.

An example is the "Toxic Toys" story that inevitably runs every December as Christmas nears. It's not that some reporter has ferreted out secrets or some independent scientist announced a new discovery. No, it's because Greenpeace has issued its annual holiday press release. Media want news about kids' toys at this time of year, so Greenpeace obliges with a story that serves its campaign against plastics and chlorine-based chemistry.

It's just one of dozens of examples. Like the shark stories that run in August. The wildfire-caused-by-camper stories of early summer. The tanker spills, the pollution-eating microbes, the floods, droughts, and hurricanes. The burning rain forest. The endless variation of the killer-bee archetype, the invasive species du jour.

Maybe the stories get repetitive because the media too often rely on others to initiate and define stories -- whether environmental groups, industry groups, government agencies, legislative committees, or plaintiffs in court.

Many of these stories had something in common. They demanded little in the way of understanding of the intricacies of government or science. They were stories focused on an emotion, and image, a symbol, a dramatic event, a protagonist, hero, or villain.

And they also tend to be stories that can be done by general assignment reporters rather than specialists. They demand almost as little of the journalists doing them as their audiences. They are easy to pitch to editors and producers who may know even less about the environment (or government) than the reporter pitching them.

The hard stories too often remain undone. Hard for readers, hard for journalists, hard for the media conglomerates for whom news is just another form of entertainment or advertising.

Hard, too, to outline here the kind of stories that might constitute the cutting edge, the future of environmental journalism. The old story-clichés are always being replaced by new story-clichés.

Perhaps environmental journalism's future (if it has one) lies precisely in the unexploited opportunities. One thinks of stories published in the last year about efforts to obtain the documents of the Cheney energy task force. The coverage has focused single-mindedly on the struggle over access to the documents, because it is a story of conflict. Yet only a scant handful of the best journalists have tried to tell the story contained in the many task force documents already disclosed to plaintiffs.

Or take the environmental movement. How many environmental journalists think of, or act toward, environmental groups merely as a source of easy handouts, or a voice in a debate? (In fact there is a large branch of journalism that does not even distinguish itself from the environmental movement, a lot of it is very good at what it does.) What if journalists were to stand back from environmentalism more detachedly and treat it as a subject in itself? It would cease to look like a monolith with a single party line. It would look more like a huge, varied community, and political and cultural ecosystem full of niches and constantly in a state of dynamic change. It would be the stuff of hundreds of stories.

You could of course do the same with the industry-government ecosystem. There are hundreds of untold stories about the industry associations, their alliances, law firms, lobbyists, and fundraising activities, and of their influence on policy in all three branches of government. A big story in mainstream media this year was the campaign reform bill. But there were too few stories in the prior decade based on the trove of lobbying and campaign-giving information that was already available under previous law.

How many journalists regularly scan Emerging Infectious Diseases, the CDC's peer-reviewed, free, online monthly which reads like a press advisory for the next Michael Crichton novel? Why do the media worry about the french fries at McDonalds, but not the security of nuclear materials in Russia? Do we restrict coverage to the multimillion-gallon spill from the Prestige off the Spanish coast -- or do we write about the risks of a similar spill in the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, or Puget Sound? (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently did a good one).

There are so many incredible stories left to tell.