FDA E-Mail Tracking Included Reporters

July 25, 2012–The Food and Drug Administration secretly captured e-mails of FDA employees suspected of whistleblowing for agency laxity in protecting the public — but ended up also reading correspondence with reporters, lawyers, and Congress.

PEER Charges Secrecy in Denials of National Park System Status to 3 Trails

July 25, 2012–Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is charging the National Park Service with duplicity for multiple reasons regarding demotion of the North Country, Ice Age, and New England Trails, which collectively span 6,020 miles.

Got Corruption? Data on State Lawmaker Conflicts Hard To Get

July 11, 2012–A large and diverse array of businesses have an interest in the environmental and energy laws that state legislatures consider: including coal, oil, plastics, chemicals, mining, forest products, and others. The possible financial stake lawmakers may have in the bills before them is fertile ground for investigation. Here's help in finding story ideas.

Directory of Open Access Journals a Boon for Environmental Reporters

June 13, 2012–The rebellion against commercial and subscription-only publishers over public access to articles based on taxpayer-funded research is gaining ground. The Directory — free, searchable and online — already includes some 819742, full-text, scientific or scholarly articles in 7885 journals.

Data.gov Keeps on Giving Gifts to Gumshoe Reporters

May 30, 2012–The federal Data.gov, while not perfect, has grown over three years especially strong in datasets from federal agencies that deal with the environment, energy, natural resources, health, and science. Many of them are downloadable, so that you can crunch them on your own computer. Several are map layers or geo-tagged in some way. See a few randomly chosen examples here.

Cool Data Tools: EPA Releases NEPAssist Mapper

May 2, 2012–For reporters wanting to pry open the worm-cans of local environmental stories, EPA's new GIS tool lets you map Environmental Impact Statements project information against a rich backdrop: layer after layer of geographic, demographic, environmental, and economic context. And, it can be used in conjunction with EJView, EPA's environmental justice online mapping tool.

CRS Reports: You Paid for Them — You May As Well Read Them

May 2, 2012–Here are some recent reports by the Congressional Research Service related to the environment/energy beat. Congress does not release them to the public. We again thank the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project for doing so. 

Dark Hand of OMB Lifted from FOIA Recommendations — Or So They Say

May 2, 2012–OMB sat on the Office of Government Information Services recommendations for over a year, until a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March 2012 demanded OMB release the recommendations, which finally happened April 24th. However, no recommendations for legislative change were included. Nobody knows what, if any, legislative recommendations OGIS may have originally proposed.

Sad But True: Many Agency Press Offices Stifle Reporter Contact with Employees

May 2, 2012–Now there is research proving what reporters have known all along, thanks to a survey from the Society of Professional Journalists. SPJ commissioned work by survey research professionals who canvassed newsgatherers during January-February 2012. Here are some of the findings and a link to the full report.

Denver Post Exposes FDA Secrecy on Food Threats to Public Health

April 18, 2012–Reporter Michael Booth's story resurrected the old issue of whether the public has a right to know the identity and source of foods in commerce that government agencies actually know may be causing fatal illness. The FDA refused to comment on the story.