SEJournal Online

SEJournal banner

 

SEJournal is the weekly digital news magazine of the Society of Environmental Journalists. SEJ members are automatically subscribed. Nonmembers may subscribe using the link below. Send questions, comments, story ideas, articles, news briefs and tips to Editor Adam Glenn at sejournaleditor@sej.org. Or contact Glenn if you're interested in joining the SEJournal volunteer editorial staff.

Trump 2.0 EJWatch

TipSheet | Reporter's Toolbox | Backgrounders | WatchDog |

BookShelf | EJ Academy | EJ InSight | Voices of Environmental Justice |

Features | FEJ StoryLog | Freelance Files | Inside Story | SEJ News

About SEJournal    Non-Members: Subscribe Now

  • Advertise in the digital SEJournal! Find advertising information and rates here.
    (SEJ members: Advertise your recent book in the digital SEJournal — only $50.)


Latest SEJournal Issues RSS

June 18, 2025

  • Trump administration efforts to defund public media, now before Congress, are a misguided effort to harm a source of journalism that is highly trusted by audiences, argues the latest WatchDog Opinion column. And while public broadcasting’s diverse funding sources may insulate it from politics to some degree, the attacks do threaten to chill press freedom, including environmental reporting, more broadly. The latest Dog explains.

June 11, 2025

  • A private social media message piqued Arizona Republic reporter Joan Meiners’ interest in rural retirees’ efforts to block construction of a gas-fired peaker plant next to their homes. Her year-long, grant-funded investigation in 2024 uncovered questionable local government actions and utility executive motives, and concluded with action against the facility. Read Meiners’ account of how rural Arizonans became unlikely climate activists, in the latest FEJ Storylog.

  • Streamflow data gathered by thousands of U.S. Geological Survey gauges helps track the country’s floods and droughts. But it may be lost if the Trump administration follows up on a decision not to renew leases of USGS water science centers that read the gauges and disseminate the measurements. Reporter’s Toolbox on the value of this database and the risk of its loss.

June 4, 2025

  • Media coverage of “bugs” is often sensationalistic and centered on fear and disgust. But conservation photographer and writer Danae Wolfe says journalists should be highlighting the importance, beauty and plight of insects and spiders. Reporting that offers alternative perspectives on these essential creatures can inspire curiosity and admiration, and encourage efforts to protect them. Wolfe on why to write about insects.

  • With fishing season underway across the United States, reporters have a line to an array of great, local environmental stories, whether about the recreation and tourism industries or overfishing and the health of regional ecosystems. The latest TipSheet has more than a dozen story ideas and reporting resources to help you reel in an angle of your own.

  • It’s not just scientists who are being lost to the new administration’s extensive firings of federal workers. A Backgrounder Analysis argues it’s the science itself. It’s happening at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but also across agencies that conduct research to protect health and the environment, whether around toxic chemicals or on the battleground of climate change science. A frank look at the reality and what’s being lost for journalists and the communities they serve.

May 28, 2025

  • As the Trump administration rolls back Biden-era rules limiting the presence of “forever chemicals” in drinking water, an updated data mapping tool helps pinpoint local angles on the PFAS story. The latest TipSheet outlines the basics on this class of widely used chemicals, their risks to humans and the challenges of regulating them, plus provides a half-dozen story ideas and questions to ask.

  • On a tour of the West Bank this spring, Yessenia Funes found a region where the relationship between land and people serves as a counterweight to occupation and the threat of violence. For her Voices of Environmental Justice column, Funes exhorts fellow environment journalists to report on that struggle, through stories that touch on wildlife, wildfire, food, climate and more.

  • When an ecologist and a cartoonist team up to explore the realities of colonizing Mars, the result is a humorous and highly informative book on whether humans are truly up to settling space. They detour into the intimacies of zero-gravity intimacy and the challenges of ensuring a food supply. From BookShelf contributing editor Melody Kemp, a review of “A City on Mars.”

May 21, 2025

  • Environmental journalists need environmental data, even as it’s being stripped from government sites by the Trump administration. That’s where a band of programmers organized into the Public Environmental Data Partners comes in. The latest Toolbox reports it’s rescuing wiped data and making it accessible to reporters. Learn who’s behind the project and get an overview of some of the datasets being restored.

Pages