By MIKE DUNNE

Two members of the Society of Environmental Journalists honored recently for their investigative reporting efforts say that digging through records and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting helped them make good stories great.

Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette was the winner of the Scripps Howard Edward Meeman Award for environmental reporting – the third time he was so honored. His winning work focused on a coal silo permit that should not have been issued and was revoked thanks to his reporting.

 By PAUL D. THACKER 

Where are the global warming skeptics in Europe?

If you canvas a wide variety of news (what journalist doesn't?) and read some newspapers in Europe, you'll notice something about their coverage of global warming: no skeptics. That's right. The media coverage of high-profile global warming skeptics is pretty much an American phenomenon, according to some noted journalists who cover the issue outside the United States.

Ever wonder what lies beneath your feet – what's down there in the ground on which we walk? The Toledo Blade's Tom Henry has an editor who asked that question and the result was an interesting look at what the government is doing – or not doing – to clean up gasoline spills from leaky underground tanks.