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Inside Story

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Inside Story is a regular question-and-answer feature of SEJournal Online in which we hear from award-winning journalists about the behind-the-scenes practices, ideas and breakthroughs that led to their best work, and their advice to other journalists about how to excel.

For questions and comments, or to suggest future Inside Story features, email Inside Story Co-Editors Rocky Kistner and Chioma Lewis at sejournaleditor@sej.org.

Also be sure to check out past winners of the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.

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September 17, 2025

  • Teaming Up To Tap Into Texas Regulatory Capture

    When reporters from Inside Climate News and The Texas Tribune teamed up on a multipart series about Texas environmental regulators, they found state agencies sidestepping science, the law and accountability. The beneficiaries? The oil and gas industry. Their prizewinning reporting was praised for its data analysis, and public records and field reporting. Read an Inside Story Q&A with Martha Pskowski of Inside Climate News.

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August 20, 2025

  • Saving Big Cats From Humans

    As expanded development on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula encroaches on prime wildlife habitat, big cats find it harder to avoid people, and many wind up dead. In this Inside Story Q&A, Liza Gross of Inside Climate News describes how she and photographer/editor Michael Kodas worked with a local cougar protection team to track a family of big cats to their den and through the area.

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June 18, 2025

  • Tainted Water, Tainted Power — Inside a Hog-Farm Empire

    A powerful politician and his family’s groundwater-polluting agricultural business were the focus of an award-winning series that delved into the intersection of politics, power, privilege and regulatory capture. In the latest Inside Story Q&A, journalist Yanqi Xu discusses how the reporting uncovered deep and unexpected impacts on small town economies, water quality and the living conditions of the hog farms’ neighbors.

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May 14, 2025

  • ‘Misplaced Trust’ Aims Big, But Finds Details Make the Difference

    A project of vast scope was needed to tell the untold story of stolen lands originally promised to Indigenous nations. But for Tristan Ahtone, it was the pursuit of "smaller" stories arising out of the detailed data that was the Grist team’s proudest result. Explore the high points — plus three key lessons — of this Pulliam Prize-winning project, in Ahtone’s Inside Story Q&A.

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March 26, 2025

  • ‘A Myriad of Voices’ Tells of Restoring a Swamp in Crisis

    When a pair of journalists reported on a degraded Colombian mangrove swamp, they turned to two local fishermen to help tell the story, tapping into their experience as they worked to repair the ecosystem that fed their community. In the latest Inside Story Q&A, reporter Jacobo Patiño Giraldo explains their successful use of primary source solutions journalism.

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February 26, 2025

  • The Forgotten Victims of Hidalgo

    Contaminated water sickened thousands of residents near Mexico City for 40 years — even as officials knew they were being poisoned. Then, an investigative news team turned its attention to the polluted region, and produced multiple video and text versions of an award-winning feature focused on the residents’ health, poverty and more. Read a revealing Q&A with investigative producer Carlos Carabaña in the new Inside Story.

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December 18, 2024

  • Beat Reporter Spotlights Costs of California's Environmental Reckoning

    The fossil fuel industry’s outsized climate policy role in the U.S.’s most populous state is the core of award-winning coverage from investigative journalist Aaron Cantú for nonprofit newsroom Capital & Main. In the new Inside Story Q&A, Cantú shares some of what challenged him in his reporting, what surprised him most and a lesson learned.

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November 6, 2024

  • Prize Winner Spurs Policy Change on Illinois PFAS Contamination

    When Illinois downplayed the results of long-delayed PFAS testing in the state’s public water supply, Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne revisited a story he had first covered two decades before. His investigation uncovered dangerous practices threatening public health, won him accolades and moved the needle on state policy. How he went about it, in the new Inside Story Q&A.

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September 18, 2024

  • Investigation Explores Dueling Narratives for Addressing Climate Change

    Is carbon capture a climate solution or a dangerous distraction? That was the question that Inside Climate News reporter Nicholas Kusnetz asked in his award-winning explanatory series, “Pipe Dreams.” For Inside Story, Kusnetz talks of the challenges of writing about a technology that largely doesn’t yet exist, and the variety of story forms he used to explore the reality of industry promises.

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August 21, 2024

  • The Battle To Protect Congo’s Vast Peatlands

    The Congo Basin is home to the biggest network of tropical peatlands in the world, a vast carbon storehouse central to combating the challenge of climate change. A team of reporters made the journey to this little-covered region and returned with an award-winning feature that told the tale not just of the peatlands, but of the people that protect it. The latest Inside Story Q&A.

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SEJournal Online is the digital news magazine of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Learn more about SEJournal Online, including submission, subscription and advertising information.