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Ken Ward

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Ward has covered environmental news since joining the Gazette staff 15 years ago and became its main environmental reporter in 1994. He also covers mine safety and other workplace safety issues, along with public records and some economic development issues. He is a three-time winner of the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting, most recently the 2005 award. Other honors include the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists' Stolberg Award for his work with the SEJ's First Amendment Task Force. When he's not working, Ward says he's busy "trying to raise my 16-month-old son, Thomas, right." He responded to e-mailed questions from Environment Writer's Bill Dawson.

Your Alicia Patterson Foundation research topic is "The Curse of Coal." That's a very broad subject. What problems associated with coal do you intend to examine? Will your focus be larger than what it's been at your newspaper?

Well, I started out with a very broad topic on purpose - in part to give myself freedom and in part because I think that many of the issues raised by the coal industry - from power plant pollution to acid mine drainage and mountaintop removal, to mine safety or fair taxation, are connected. The Gazette covers the coal industry a lot. Paul Nyden has been writing about the industry for decades. But I still am not sure that we do a very good job of connecting all of the industry's dots for our readers. We try, but we should and could do more. That's probably a problem not unique to the Gazette or the coal industry. Reporters have become more and more like our audience - we've developed more of a short-attention span than we should have. But it's something I wanted to work on with this fellowship.

But things changed a lot on Jan. 2, when the Sago Mine blew up. Mine safety has been a topic I've covered on and off since coming to the Gazette in 1991. And I had always included it in my Alicia Patterson proposals (this is the third year I've applied). But it is such a big issue now. This is a time when people will pay attention. So a lot of my focus has shifted to that particular issue. I'd like to fit in some other things, too, especially doing some reporting on the government's clean coal program. But I guess that depends on how fast these six months go.

You're nationally recognized for your reporting on the coal industry in your part of the country. What aspects of that experience led you to apply for an Alicia Patterson fellowship?

First, the Gazette far more than most papers - especially those our size - gives reporters tons of time and newsprint to cover broad issues in an in-depth way. It's one of the reasons I work here. West Virginia is very lucky to have a statewide, locally owned newspaper that is truly a reporter's paper. If you want to write great stories, this is a fine place to work. We have to thank our publisher, Elizabeth Chilton, and her family (the owners) for keeping the faith in good journalism at small newspapers.

But I think I wanted to slow down a little bit, and not be worried about the next deadline. To be honest, my applications started the year that my father died, when I kind of felt like I needed to do something different for a little while. I think that the muscle that journalists use the least - and should use the most - is their brain. That sounds odd. But I think we don't spend enough time thinking. Just thinking. Thinking about what stories we should be doing and how we should be doing. We're always all so rushed to just DO the next story.

I read someone say that every newsroom needs someone to read every reporter's budget and say, "OK, why the hell are you doing THAT story?" And I think that's true. So partly, this fellowship is giving me some time to look at things and figure out what stories I should be doing, and, hopefully, to do a couple of them.

It's kind of difficult to get used to not having deadlines to drive my work. But it's also nice to have a more flexible schedule for a while. I can go get my kid from daycare and take him to the park at 3 p.m. if I feel like it.

How will the Gazette staff your beat in your absence?

Luckily, the Gazette has a great number of people who have an interest in the environment and who cover it when I'm there and when I'm not. Nyden will continue to do some environmental work, as he always has. Eric Eyre is covering economic development issues, and has taken on some stories about windmills. Another reporter, Tara Tuckwiller, is doing some environmental stories, too. She's just started working kind of a mini-beat, I guess you'd call it, on some consumer-oriented stories such as green buildings and Teflon cookware that I'm sure will be very popular with readers.

I can imagine some newspaper editors being reluctant, even unwilling, to approve a leave for an experienced and valuable reporter. Did your editors take some persuading to approve yours?

Well, when Sago happened, I was worried about that. I'd been slowly increasing the share of my time that I spent on mine safety and I was going to be our point-person in following up on Sago. Understand that this is the biggest mine disaster in nearly 40 years in my state. It's a huge story for us. But my city editor, Rob Byers, has been very supportive, as has my managing editor, Patty Tompkins, and the assistant city editor, Greg Moore. They've really made me feel like this is something they think is good for me professionally and personally, and for the Gazette, too.

We agreed early on that I would continue doing reporting for the paper about Sago and mine safety. Now, I'm not doing every press release that MSHA (the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration) releases or that sort of thing. But I'm turning out some investigative pieces as I report for my fellowship. It's reporting I would be doing anyway, and they are worthwhile stories for the paper as well.

Articles produced by Alicia Patterson fellows are published in the foundation's magazine, APF Reporter, and made available for free republication elsewhere. Some fellows also turn their research into books. Will your newspaper republish your fellowship articles? Any plans for a book?

The Gazette has agreed to publish some of the articles I do for the fellowship. I'm still working with the fellowship coordinator, Peggy Engle, on other possible outlets, including some magazines. Everyone asks me if I'm writing a book, and I really don't know. I guess it would be great to write a book, but I'm not sure if I have one in me or not. We'll see.

Coal looms awfully large right now in a lot of environmental and related issues - worker safety, mining's environmental impacts, conventional air pollutants from power plants, greenhouse gases and global warming and proposals for "clean coal" technologies, to name a few of the big ones. Any tips for other environmental reporters whose beats aren't as dominated by coal as yours is, but who want to keep up with major trends and developments?

I think that's a hard thing to do. Coal is one of the most complicated businesses in the country, I think, and understanding it is a lifetime's work.

One thing that I see all the time is folks over-stereotyping West Virginia and other coal states - in terms of how much our economy is driven by coal. Coal is big in a few areas, but tourism is really bigger here in many places, and I think most people who are honest believe coal will continue to decline in employment over time, for a lot of different reasons.

I say all of that because I asked some national enviros at an SEJ conference once ... well, they were blowing off the mouth about how terrible it is that we still mine coal in West Virginia, and how we were killing the planet with carbon emissions, etc. I asked them how they would provide jobs for the folks in Boone or Logan County who rely on coal, and they basically said that wasn't their problem. I think it is their problem. The whole country was built on coal from West Virginia. We won two world wars with coal from West Virginia. We get most of our power from coal. If society as a whole has benefited - through cheap power - by the product that killed the miners at Sago or that is warming the planet to a dangerous point, then we all ought to share in finding a way for folks here to live without coal if we're deciding to phase it out.

I guess that's the big thing.

Political writers do this all the time, too, and it drives me nuts. The Associated Press's hot political writers from Washington wrote a lot of stuff during the last election about coal driving West Virginia's vote for Bush, and they provided very little evidence to support their theories.

The other thing I guess I would say is that folks should stop parachuting in here to do one day's worth of reporting and then write broad-stroke stories about mountaintop removal or mine safety. If you want to do those stories, come spend some time here and get to know the issues and the people. This is my home, and I get kind of tired of folks who see little but the airport and the Interstate saying what's going on here.

It's also interesting to me to see how much of the information that folks from outside West Virginia use in stories about coal comes not from government records or scientific reports, but from the environmental groups. Not that they aren't sources that we should turn to. They are. But often I see the same kinds of exaggerations in newspaper stories that I see in environmental group news releases, and it's quoted as fact. It makes me wonder about the other stories these same newspapers publish on other issues -- are they relying only on one group of sources there, too?

But you asked for tips, so I will try to give a couple. If you want to understand coal, first read some history. Coal country and the coal industry have rich histories. And I really believe it's impossible to understand today's coal industry without understanding yesterday's. Despite the industry's PR campaigns, a lot of things really are the same.

John Alexander Williams' "West Virginia: A History," has a chapter toward the end about coal that is one of the best things ever written about the industry. Barbara Freese's book, "Coal: A Human History," is good, too. Call some West Virginia historians and talk to them about the coal industry. Ron Lewis at West Virginia University is the best. But there are others, like John Hennen at Morehead State and my friend and former Gazette reporter Robert Woodrum, who is publishing a new book about Alabama coal miners. Or, go get Gerald Stern's book about the Buffalo Creek disaster. It was "A Civil Action" long before John Travolta did the movie.

I'd try to monitor some of the coalfield newspapers. We update our strip mining website regularly, and our Sago Disaster site, too. Both of the big Kentucky papers, Lexington and Louisville, cover the coal industry. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review do, too.