By JAN KNIGHT

After a disaster, news coverage can amplify risk, create new health syndromes, study shows.

Disasters and their aftermaths can have repercussions that reach beyond the days or weeks that follow, and news reports can strongly impact public reaction to related risks, even contributing to increased reports of health-related problems that may not be linked to the disaster, a recent study shows.

 SEJ's 16th Annual Conference, to be held in Burlington, Vt., Oct. 25-29, promises the same sort of story-producing tours, great speakers and informative panels that SEJ conference goers have come to expect.

But this year some pre-conference workshops – one a boot camp for journalists and the other at Vermont Law School – will offer new opportunities to journalists.

 By JOSEPH A. DAVIS

That old feeling of helplessness is gone. The news media and public no longer see erosion of the First Amendment, the Freedom of Information Act and disclosure requirements in many environmental laws as inevitable ... and worse, unimportant.

Or so a recent vote in Congress signaled.

 There we were, 21 environmental reporters, freelancers, students and professors, all huddled and shivering in an unheated blind on the Platte River.

We were waiting in the breezy, 20-degree cold for thousands of lesser sandhill cranes to return from feeding in the corn fields and roost for the night on protective sandbars. Each spring, the cranes leave their southwest wintering spots and stop in central Nebraska to rest and eat before heading out to their Arctic nesting grounds.

 By PERRY BEEMAN

Some years ago, a board member or two suggested SEJ change its name.

Why? Because the phrase "environmental journalists" seemed to suggest "environmentalist journalists" to some, especially those who suspect the group has some sort of environmental agenda akin to the Sierra Club's.

By VINCE PATTON

 In Miami, NBC-6 reporter Jeff Burnside thought he had a great story about the restoration of bountiful seagrass beds. But managers weren't interested.

"Later," Burnside says, "I pitched a story about steep fines for boaters running aground." That story they liked.