In this excerpt from the latest issue of SEJournal (Spring), we debut the new EJ Academy column (a place for educators and students to explore current research on environmental journalism) with University of Michigan's Emilia Askari sharing how she and SEJ member Julie Halpert teach news innovation à la Knight Challenge style.
SEJ has replied to EPA's June 10 justification of its "no attribution" press phone briefing on June 2. SEJ's June 12 letter of response, available here, acknowledges EPA's extensive public roll-out, but challenges EPA to create the conditions for a truly two-way exchange between the agency and the news media. SEJ's original June 5, 2014, letter objecting to the anonymous briefing is here. The EPA response of June 10 from Associate Administrator Tom Reynolds is here.
Experienced journalists know that a press credential is often critical to gaining physical or virtual access to news events and information. It's an aspect of information access rarely covered by the news media themselves. A new report from the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard looks systematically at who gets a press card and who does not.
Local reporters can find information about coal-ash situations in their own areas using a newly improved database compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project which goes well beyond anything previously available because it includes large amounts of painstaking research by EIP. The site is important for its focus on contamination of groundwater that people may drink by the toxic heavy metals in coal combustion wastes.
For some years now, under multiple administrations, journalists who have called EPA scientists and other experts asking to talk to them about matters large and small have almost universally been told something like, "I'm not allowed to talk to news media without Press Office permission." Yet EPA officials maintain they do not have a press policy. SEJ's WatchDog filed June 10, 2014 the first of what will be an ongoing series of FOIA requests to get to the bottom of this ironic situation.
ExxonMobil lost a bid to keep federal regulators and prosecutors from getting records which might show criminal negligence in its operation of the pipeline that spilled oil into the Arkansas community of Mayflower in March 2013. The judge also threw out Exxon's motion to dismiss a lawsuit against the company.
SEJ objected strenuously last week to the ground rules for a telephone press briefing on U.S. EPA's carbon emissions rule for existing power plants. In a June 5, 2014, letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, the Society of Environmental Journalists objected to the "truncated, anonymous 'background' tele-briefing for news media" held on the June 2 roll-out day. The text of EPA's June 10 response to SEJ's letter is here.
Beth Parker
Joseph A. Davis, PhD
Society of Environmental Journalists
PO Box 2492, Jenkintown, PA 19046
Ms. Parker, Dr. Davis:
Thank you for your letter to Administrator McCarthy, dated June 5, relating to the rollout and press engagement surrounding the Clean Power Plan on June 2. As the Associate Administrator for External Affairs, Administrator McCarthy asked me to respond.
From 1970 until 2010, 34.8 million more people decided to move towards the coast of the United States and that population is expected to grow just as sea-level rise and climate change continue to increase the risk of living there. Amy Wold, a reporter with The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, covers change and adaptation; locks and floodgates; levees and marshes; communities at risk; insurance issues; and lessons learned. Photo (click to enlarge): In 2012, Wold took this shot of the rapidly disappearing Cat Island in Barataria Basin in south Louisiana. She returned there in 2014 to find barely any land left above water. © Amy Wold, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate.
