SEJ President Christy George offers a timeline of EPA's most persistent issues impacting reporters doing their jobs and explains SEJ's newest initiative, FEJ, an incubator for new ideas, projects and training.
For purely journalistic reasons, reporters could periodically write about those things they had decided not to cover: Their rationale and providing links, even, for those wanting to know more. They can thereby open the doors to their own internal news decision-making, let the public see in, all in the interest of their better understanding the news-making process.
By WILLIAM DIETRICH
We're midway through an academic quarter at Western Washington University's Planet magazine, and it's time for second-draft panic.
The spring of 2009 is our student environmental magazine's 30th Anniversary, and we've got stories with no point, stories with gaping holes, stories that ignore AP style, stories with no lead, stories that stop instead of end, stories with no pictures, and pictures with no stories.
"An international fisheries group set up to protect Atlantic tuna has done the opposite and driven one species of the fish, the bluefin, to the edge of extinction, environmentalists said Thursday."
"Rapid changes already underway to the Earth's climate, ecosystems and land cover threaten the health of billions, undermining key human life-support systems and threatening the core foundations of healthy communities worldwide, according to a new report released Wednesday."
"Over the last century, the intensive use of chemical fertilizers has saturated the Earth’s soils, waters, and atmosphere with nitrogen. Now scientists are warning that we must move quickly to revolutionize agricultural systems and greatly reduce the amount of nitrogen we put into the planet's ecosystems."
"Hundreds of gasoline spills, which contain carcinogens like benzene, are reported each year in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Countless others go unreported or unnoticed. Cleaning them up can run into the millions and take decades to complete."
