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EW-Q&A Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure
It's widely expected that blogs will be a big part of American journalism's future. The environmental reporters at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are already there. Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure have been teaming up to produce an environmental blog on the newspaper's website, "Dateline Earth," since late last year. Stiffler, a lifelong resident of the Northwest, calls herself "a recovered fruit fly biologist." She has worked for the P-I for the past seven years and been on the environment beat there for almost five years. Before joining the newspaper, McClure formerly worked for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and United Press International. He has more than a dozen years' experience covering the environment and has won a number of journalism prizes including the John B. Oakes Award. The two reporters used to divide the environment beat roughly along subject lines, with McClure focusing more on natural resources issues and Stiffler more on pollution, but they say they're more likely to toss a coin these days to decide. Stiffler responded to e-mailed questions from Environment Writer's Bill Dawson about their blog. McClure sent word that he agreed with her answers. Your blog promises "enviro tidbits from around the region and across the globe - stuff you might have missed, cool environmental happenings locally and speedy updates for ongoing issues." Beyond that pretty comprehensive description, what are you trying to accomplish with the effort? What's your mission? We really wanted to be able to write about the stuff that was falling through the cracks, whether it was something quirky and local or something national or international that was beyond the scope of what the P-I's usual coverage includes. And given that this is an environmentally engaged area of the nation, we were also hoping to create more of a forum for readers to respond to enviro issues than the paper traditionally provides. There are also so many great resources out there, including interactive sites, and we were really excited to have a chance to connect all those dots for people and provide extra tools and places to look for folks excited about enviro issues. A lot of newspapers are launching staff-written blogs. Was "Dateline Earth" your proposal or an idea your editors came up with? What other beats are represented by staff blogs on the P-I's website? It was something that we wanted to do in conjunction with creating an enviro home page for the P-I with resources for readers that could also feature some of our best work. Business and sports reporters already had blogs going and since we launched our blog, political reporters have come on board as well. The blog's archives go back to last November. Has your approach to "Dateline Earth" evolved significantly since then? We've loosened up a little in our style of writing and have embraced more of the national and international stories, often making whatever local connections are appropriate, versus doing very much on really narrowly focused Seattle area items. It appears that you post one blog item on most weekdays. Sometimes, a day or two has passed without a new item. On some days, you've posted two items. Is it your general aim to have one item a day, Monday through Friday? Yep, our goal is one a day during the week. How do you share the duties? Is there some formal arrangement? How collaborative is the effort - for instance, does one of you sometimes come up with a topic, which the other one then ends up writing about? It's about as informal as you can imagine. We both have some idea as to how busy the other person is and we try to cover for the busier one when possible. When it comes to topics, anything goes. Occasionally we'll let the other person know what we're planning to blog on ahead of time, but not always. It's really whatever is tripping our triggers. Does the blog typically include items that you're not reporting in a regular news story on that day? In other words, do you see it as a service that primarily augments and complements your regular articles, instead of duplicating? We do try to hit coverage areas that the paper is otherwise missing. But sometimes if other news media are reporting on a topic we're covering, but advancing the story in interesting ways, maybe raising points we missed or providing useful context, we'll do an item on that and refer back to our articles too. There's a personal, conversational approach in "Dateline Earth," which is common in the blogosphere but not in standard news reporting. For instance, Robert confessed in an item on a recent National Academy of Sciences report fueling concerns about fluoride in drinking water that he had previously thought of people concerned about the issue as "kooks." Is it a challenge to swing back and forth between the "reporting" style and the "blogging" style or something that comes easily? Robert's use of "kooks" may have been a significant milestone in our evolution of doing blogs that are more casual and approachable! It's a little bit of a challenge to keep the styles separate, but we're hoping that our regular reporting is benefiting from the blogs. It can get easy to bog down in super technical language in our day-to-day enviro stories. Some newspaper reporters have expressed worries that the extra demands of new media forms - blogs, podcasts, frequent updating of the website with breaking news - will mean they don't have as much time to devote to their traditional duties, especially time-consuming investigative and other in-depth reporting. What has your experience been so far? This is a totally legitimate concern – and one of the reasons we'd highly recommend blogging with one or more partners. Unless your editors think that a blog is a super-high priority, you're always going to be sacrificing reporting or blogging to one degree or another. It seems rare that higher-ups appreciate how much time it takes to do decent blogs. Some items on your blog have inspired a lot of readers to post comments. Some prompted just a few comments, or none at all. Can you draw any conclusions yet about what types of items, or what subjects, seem to bring the most response? We're trying to get smarter about writing blogs that provoke more response. It seems that either controversial topics (fluoride in water) or blogs that pose questions (pros and cons of biodiesel) or even blogs that insert a little more humor (polar bears with water wings) are the most likely to get responses. Have reader comments, as well as the general work involved in assembling the blog items, enhanced your reporting? For instance, have you done a blog item on an unfamiliar subject that led you to do a full article on that topic? Absolutely. It's been more the case that research for the blog has provided us more depth and context for issues we'd be writing on anyhow. And it's made us explore other publications and resources that we were less familiar with previously.
Environment Writer Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography Office of Marine Programs Narragansett, RI 02882 Tel: 401-874-6211; Fax: 401-874-6485 Disclaimer * Copyright 2002-2006 * All rights reserved. * University of Rhode Island |