Society of Environmental Journalists’ founder Jim Detjen and I were sitting together at an SEJ gathering not long ago wondering about the size of the collective readership/viewer/listenership of all of SEJ’s members. In essence, what is our potential reach? We calculated that it must be in the tens of millions. That’s power to help set the national dialogue and, in many cases, the global dialogue. Read more from SEJ President Jeff Burnside.
The quarterly SEJ President's Report in SEJournal normally examines an issue important to the future health of the Society of Environmental Journalists and what you as a member might do about it. This time, in the just-released Winter 2015 issue, Jeff Burnside's report examines a different set of responsibilities: whether journalism is asleep at the wheel in failing to sufficiently cover a looming, irreversible environmental issue. Our most iconic and beloved wild species are now on the precipice of extinction, functionally if not literally.
In this issue: On our watch, say goodbye to tigers; kickstart an EJ career with the new SEJ Emerging Environmental Journalist Award; Oregonian reporter ‘humanizes’ harm; finding stories with the National Inventory of Dams; sticking to the freelance life; author spends two decades ‘hooked on a character’; ignoring the elephant in the (news)room; journalism and science students take to field together; more.
With SEJ currently celebrating its 25th anniversary year, we asked some of the society’s founders — among them luminaries in the environmental journalism profession — to share their thoughts on what the organization has meant to the field, where SEJ is going next and what they see as the big environmental stories of our time. Here are their insights.
Here are some reports of possible interest to environmental journalists from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Congress does not release them to the public, but the Union of Concerned Scientists' Government Secrecy Project does.
It's never too early for journalists to complain about secrecy. Case in point: the database of drone owners which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) plans to register. A key task force recently recommended that the database be exempt from the federal Freedom of Information Act.
States often keep consumer complaint data, and it may be available under public records laws. The nonprofit consumer group Truth in Advertising recently finished a review of all 50 U.S. states' consumer complaint databases — and how easy they were to access.
One reason for thinking the White House endorses and enforces tight message control is the fact that many agency press secretaries come from a background of working on presidential elections campaigns. Journalism groups have raised their hopes now that a meeting with the White House has been scheduled mid-December. At the meeting will be representatives of SEJ, the Society of Professional Journalists and possibly others, representing concerns of a coalition of more than 50 other j-groups.
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