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   <title>In Depth: Cable</title>
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   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1</id>
   <updated>2009-11-12T17:22:25Z</updated>
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   <title>Creative Media Partnership Between History Channel and Boxing Title Match to Promote a TV Series </title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/11/creative_media_partnership_bet.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38925</id>
   
   <published>2009-11-12T20:00:00Z</published>
   <updated>2009-11-12T17:22:25Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[As clients put more and more pressure on their media agencies to figure out how to break through an ever increasingly crowded media environment, it becomes imcumbent&nbsp;on those who work on the planning side to think out-of-the-box.That's almost a cliche these days, but it's far easier said than done.Here's a most recent example of out-of-the-box thinking that sounds&nbsp;smart.The set-up: The History Channel has this pretty cool show called &quot;Pawn Stars.&quot; For those&nbsp;who haven't seen it, think &quot;American Chopper&quot; meets &quot;Antiques Roadshow.&quot; It all about the goings on at the Gold and Silver pawn shop in Las Vegas.The show features three generations of the Harrisons: Granddad Richard, who started the pawn shop, his son Rick, and Rick's son Corey.As you may have guessed, the show skews male.The question then becomes: What's a good way to promote this show to its target demo.That was basically the challenge&nbsp;put to Horizon Media by Ann Marie Granite, History's Director of Consumer Media, and her boss, Chris Moseley, Senior Vice President of Marketing for History.Moseley, who has won just about every marketing award out there, is a long-time veteran of some great promo campaigns she did for the&nbsp;Hallmark Channel, and before that at Discovery Communications.As Granite and Moseley explained to me the other day, the idea is to present the History Channel as&nbsp;an entertainment brand that delivers substance and real information.So here's what Horizon came up with: &quot;Pawn Stars,&quot; which has new episodes starting Nov. 30th, has hooked up with Top Rank to sponsor the Nov. 14th world championship welterweight boxing match, in Vegas,&nbsp;between Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto.Horizon worked with The Leverage Agency, Top Rank's brand marketing and sales agency, to do the deal.According to the History announcement, &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; will sponsor the 'Tale of the Tape,' and will be prominent in the opening, closing and pre-main event portions&quot; of the fight, which will be televised, live, as an HBO pay-per-view event.Furthermore, the announcement says that &quot;the deal includes ring announcements and ringside seating&quot; for all three of the Harrisons. The venue will be filled with signage featuring the &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; logo, including on the mat.In addition, &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; will be integrated into the ads for the fight. You'll even get a &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; message if you watch the weigh in, which will be widely distributed by ESPN, DirecTV and Yahoo.com, among others.Moseley says that it's a hallmark History Channel campaign in that it'll have an &quot;organic&quot; feel. &quot;Half will be advertising, half will be the presence of the Harrisons themselves,&quot; she says. For example, plan to see the Harrisons, identified with &quot;Pawn Stars,&quot; on-camera during the National Anthem before the fight. And they'll be at the press conference as well--I.D'd with their show, of course.Furthermore,&nbsp;Moseley says this deal with Top Rank is in the tradition of History's out-of-the box promotions, which include several firsts, such as the first &quot;wrapping&quot; of an Acela Amtrak train and the first &quot;wrapping&quot; of a New York City subway car.According to Granite and Moseley, the smart media agencies--and the smart brands--should work to break through media clutter by coming up with integrated plans that put&nbsp;brands in places that at first might seem unexpected, but upon reflection are perfect fits.#]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Chuck Ross</name>
      
   </author>
   
      <category term="Advertising" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Business" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   <category term="3791" label="boxing" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="7887" label="History Channel" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="138" label="Horizon Media" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="9829" label="Manny Pacquiao" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="9831" label="Miguel Cotto" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="9833" label="Top Rank" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[As clients put more and more pressure on their media agencies to figure out how to break through an ever increasingly crowded media environment, it becomes imcumbent&nbsp;on those who work on the planning side to think out-of-the-box.That's almost a cliche these days, but it's far easier said than done.Here's a most recent example of out-of-the-box thinking that sounds&nbsp;smart.The set-up: The History Channel has this pretty cool show called &quot;Pawn Stars.&quot; For those&nbsp;who haven't seen it, think &quot;American Chopper&quot; meets &quot;Antiques Roadshow.&quot; It all about the goings on at the Gold and Silver pawn shop in Las Vegas.The show features three generations of the Harrisons: Granddad Richard, who started the pawn shop, his son Rick, and Rick's son Corey.As you may have guessed, the show skews male.The question then becomes: What's a good way to promote this show to its target demo.That was basically the challenge&nbsp;put to Horizon Media by Ann Marie Granite, History's Director of Consumer Media, and her boss, Chris Moseley, Senior Vice President of Marketing for History.Moseley, who has won just about every marketing award out there, is a long-time veteran of some great promo campaigns she did for the&nbsp;Hallmark Channel, and before that at Discovery Communications.As Granite and Moseley explained to me the other day, the idea is to present the History Channel as&nbsp;an entertainment brand that delivers substance and real information.So here's what Horizon came up with: &quot;Pawn Stars,&quot; which has new episodes starting Nov. 30th, has hooked up with Top Rank to sponsor the Nov. 14th world championship welterweight boxing match, in Vegas,&nbsp;between Manny Pacquiao and Miguel Cotto.Horizon worked with The Leverage Agency, Top Rank's brand marketing and sales agency, to do the deal.According to the History announcement, &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; will sponsor the 'Tale of the Tape,' and will be prominent in the opening, closing and pre-main event portions&quot; of the fight, which will be televised, live, as an HBO pay-per-view event.Furthermore, the announcement says that &quot;the deal includes ring announcements and ringside seating&quot; for all three of the Harrisons. The venue will be filled with signage featuring the &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; logo, including on the mat.In addition, &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; will be integrated into the ads for the fight. You'll even get a &quot;Pawn Stars&quot; message if you watch the weigh in, which will be widely distributed by ESPN, DirecTV and Yahoo.com, among others.Moseley says that it's a hallmark History Channel campaign in that it'll have an &quot;organic&quot; feel. &quot;Half will be advertising, half will be the presence of the Harrisons themselves,&quot; she says. For example, plan to see the Harrisons, identified with &quot;Pawn Stars,&quot; on-camera during the National Anthem before the fight. And they'll be at the press conference as well--I.D'd with their show, of course.Furthermore,&nbsp;Moseley says this deal with Top Rank is in the tradition of History's out-of-the box promotions, which include several firsts, such as the first &quot;wrapping&quot; of an Acela Amtrak train and the first &quot;wrapping&quot; of a New York City subway car.According to Granite and Moseley, the smart media agencies--and the smart brands--should work to break through media clutter by coming up with integrated plans that put&nbsp;brands in places that at first might seem unexpected, but upon reflection are perfect fits.#]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Jeff Bewkes, Chairman &amp; CEO, Time Warner, on Why The AOL Merger NEVER Made Sense, and the Lessons We should Learn from the Fiasco (from the TVWeek Innovation360 Conference in NY City, Oct. 13, 2009)</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/jeff_bewkes_chairman_ceo_time.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38647</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-24T20:51:21Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-24T21:03:43Z</updated>
   
   <summary />
   <author>
      <name>Chuck Ross</name>
      
   </author>
   
      <category term="Advertising" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Business" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Syndication" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   <category term="399" label="AOL" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="8927" label="bad idea" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="1045" label="CEO" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="1370" label="chairman" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="8921" label="Chuck Ross" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="291" label="Comcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="4545" label="Jeff Bewkes" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="8923" label="Jeffrey Bewkes" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="8928" label="merger" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="55" label="NBC Universal" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="2358" label="Time Warner" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   <category term="8925" label="TVWeekNBCU" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Journalists Bring Global Warming Home</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/journalists_bring_global_warmi.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38284</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T18:25:16Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T18:27:32Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanIn Miami, WTVJ-TV special projects producer Jeff Burnside discovered an area of the Florida coastline that was a true flood zone, based on data from the federal government&rsquo;s new laser-measured elevation study.Then he found that new homes were being built there.&ldquo;We talked to homeowners in this neighborhood who had no idea their neighborhood would be inundated as sea levels rise and hurricane storm surges hit,&rdquo; said Burnside.Global warming is typically perceived as a story about far away &mdash; melting icecaps in the Arctic &mdash; and far in the future; both factors make the climate change story a hard sell to TV news directors and newspaper editors.&ldquo;The challenge has been to convince the local news manager that global warming can be a local story,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;For this story, neighborhoods that never imagined they&rsquo;d be potentially inundated realized for the first time that they could be.&rdquo;Covering climate change has never been an easy task. For years, environmental journalists felt compelled to give equal time to the naysayers, but times have changed.&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think you see this false balance as much as you used to,&rdquo; said Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein. &ldquo;On the Internet you have some people who, no matter what the science says and what the numbers show, won&rsquo;t buy it. But they&rsquo;re not scientists. It&rsquo;s mainly political.&rdquo;While the issue global warming been a major national environmental story for years, it now is also becoming an increasingly local one.Society of Environment Journalists President Christy George, who is special projects producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, points to stories about the devastation the pine park beetle has created in the forests in the Rockies and widespread vector-born illnesses such as the West Nile virus as two examples of very visible and local global warming stories. &ldquo;This story is getting less political all the time,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The science is just pouring in and is very conclusive.&rdquo;That doesn&rsquo;t mean that U.S. newspapers and TV newsrooms are clamoring to cover climate change on a regular basis. The perception is that global warming is still a difficult, depressing story that people don&rsquo;t want to hear, which makes news directors hesitant to assign it.&ldquo;It&rsquo;s bad news and makes people feel powerless,&rdquo; said George, &ldquo;and it remains political because the solution is political. There are still a lot of downsides to doing this story.&rdquo;ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore notes that global warming is a &ldquo;threatening&rdquo; story. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to take in what scientists are saying in terms of how dangerous this could be for civilization,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s hardly a day when I don&rsquo;t find myself being dragged out of denial by talking to a scientist.&rdquo;National Public Radio science correspondent Richard Harris points to a January 2009 Pew Research Center poll that showed global warming at the bottom of a list of 20 &ldquo;top priorities for 2009&rdquo; that respondents want President Obama to address. &ldquo;The public more and more believes that global warming is a real issue,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but they&rsquo;re less and less willing to do something about it.&rdquo;Covering global warming is also complicated by the fact that many scientific issues related to global warming are still the subjects of research and debate. &ldquo;Global warming is not one question, and that&rsquo;s what people tend to forget,&rdquo; said New York Times environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin. &ldquo;For example, there are people who widely disagree on how quickly the sea level will rise, and they&rsquo;re not employed by Exxon.&rdquo;Revkin also points out the difficulty of teasing out policy from science in the debate. President Obama is currently being urged to join other countries that have pledged to keep global warming from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. &ldquo;That number of 2 degrees Celsius was determined by policymakers, not scientists,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;So the importance of that specific number is not based on science.&rdquo;Environmental journalism is also being hit hard by tightened budgets in the newsroom. &ldquo;I have a tough time covering it, with the compression we face at The Times,&rdquo; said Revkin. &ldquo;We have shrinking story length and there&rsquo;s a growing demand on the Web to be dramatic. It&rsquo;s the same pressures faced by TV journalists, except it&rsquo;s worse on TV. I can&rsquo;t imagine anything harder to cover than global warming on TV.&rdquo;No one knows that better than WTVJ&rsquo;s Burnside, who said he &ldquo;sneaks an environmental story on the air about once a week. We don&rsquo;t have the luxury of a focus on a beat any more.&rdquo;But he also reports that he is chipping away at resistance by educating his managers about what environmental coverage can be.&ldquo;They had an immediate impression it was a National Geographic kind of story,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;But it includes drought, vector-born illnesses, economic stories about the oceans, hurricanes and so on. The breadth of environmental stories is massive.&rdquo;Climate change stories are a hard sell now, but there is movement afoot to create partnerships for more climate change news as well as train in-house resources to cover global warming topics.Climate Central, a year-old nonprofit science and media organization, was created to provide &ldquo;clear and objective information about climate change and its potential solutions.&rdquo;Director of communications/senior research scientist Dr. Heidi Cullen, who formerly was a climate expert and correspondent for The Weather Channel, reports that Climate Central has already provided stories for &ldquo;News Hour With Jim Lehrer,&rdquo; Newsweek and Time.com, but the goal is to be able to provide more local stories.&ldquo;Our heart and soul is in developing relationships with news editors at local TV news markets,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;A huge majority of Americans get their news from local TV.&rdquo; Dr. Cullen reports that they&rsquo;re &ldquo;in the early phases&rdquo; of developing partnerships with local TV news outlets.At The Yale Forum on Climate Change &amp; The Media (climatemediaforum.yale.edu), editor Bud Ward has held two workshops on climate change for meteorologists and weathercasters from the American Meteorological Society &ldquo;to elevate the meteorologist within the station hierarchy to the role of scientist.&rdquo;&ldquo;The key thing is that the meteorologist/weathercaster is the only scientist most Americans see on a day-in, day-out basis,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re in the key position to help inform the public on complex issues related to and beyond weather.&rdquo;Even so, Dr. Cullen is the first to admit that environmental journalists have a long road to travel to educate the public. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll take a long time, but we have to build up peoples&rsquo; baseline knowledge of what climate is,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re getting around that by telling locally based stories with strong scientific content.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanIn Miami, WTVJ-TV special projects producer Jeff Burnside discovered an area of the Florida coastline that was a true flood zone, based on data from the federal government&rsquo;s new laser-measured elevation study.Then he found that new homes were being built there.&ldquo;We talked to homeowners in this neighborhood who had no idea their neighborhood would be inundated as sea levels rise and hurricane storm surges hit,&rdquo; said Burnside.Global warming is typically perceived as a story about far away &mdash; melting icecaps in the Arctic &mdash; and far in the future; both factors make the climate change story a hard sell to TV news directors and newspaper editors.&ldquo;The challenge has been to convince the local news manager that global warming can be a local story,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;For this story, neighborhoods that never imagined they&rsquo;d be potentially inundated realized for the first time that they could be.&rdquo;Covering climate change has never been an easy task. For years, environmental journalists felt compelled to give equal time to the naysayers, but times have changed.&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think you see this false balance as much as you used to,&rdquo; said Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein. &ldquo;On the Internet you have some people who, no matter what the science says and what the numbers show, won&rsquo;t buy it. But they&rsquo;re not scientists. It&rsquo;s mainly political.&rdquo;While the issue global warming been a major national environmental story for years, it now is also becoming an increasingly local one.Society of Environment Journalists President Christy George, who is special projects producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, points to stories about the devastation the pine park beetle has created in the forests in the Rockies and widespread vector-born illnesses such as the West Nile virus as two examples of very visible and local global warming stories. &ldquo;This story is getting less political all the time,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The science is just pouring in and is very conclusive.&rdquo;That doesn&rsquo;t mean that U.S. newspapers and TV newsrooms are clamoring to cover climate change on a regular basis. The perception is that global warming is still a difficult, depressing story that people don&rsquo;t want to hear, which makes news directors hesitant to assign it.&ldquo;It&rsquo;s bad news and makes people feel powerless,&rdquo; said George, &ldquo;and it remains political because the solution is political. There are still a lot of downsides to doing this story.&rdquo;ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore notes that global warming is a &ldquo;threatening&rdquo; story. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to take in what scientists are saying in terms of how dangerous this could be for civilization,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s hardly a day when I don&rsquo;t find myself being dragged out of denial by talking to a scientist.&rdquo;National Public Radio science correspondent Richard Harris points to a January 2009 Pew Research Center poll that showed global warming at the bottom of a list of 20 &ldquo;top priorities for 2009&rdquo; that respondents want President Obama to address. &ldquo;The public more and more believes that global warming is a real issue,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but they&rsquo;re less and less willing to do something about it.&rdquo;Covering global warming is also complicated by the fact that many scientific issues related to global warming are still the subjects of research and debate. &ldquo;Global warming is not one question, and that&rsquo;s what people tend to forget,&rdquo; said New York Times environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin. &ldquo;For example, there are people who widely disagree on how quickly the sea level will rise, and they&rsquo;re not employed by Exxon.&rdquo;Revkin also points out the difficulty of teasing out policy from science in the debate. President Obama is currently being urged to join other countries that have pledged to keep global warming from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. &ldquo;That number of 2 degrees Celsius was determined by policymakers, not scientists,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;So the importance of that specific number is not based on science.&rdquo;Environmental journalism is also being hit hard by tightened budgets in the newsroom. &ldquo;I have a tough time covering it, with the compression we face at The Times,&rdquo; said Revkin. &ldquo;We have shrinking story length and there&rsquo;s a growing demand on the Web to be dramatic. It&rsquo;s the same pressures faced by TV journalists, except it&rsquo;s worse on TV. I can&rsquo;t imagine anything harder to cover than global warming on TV.&rdquo;No one knows that better than WTVJ&rsquo;s Burnside, who said he &ldquo;sneaks an environmental story on the air about once a week. We don&rsquo;t have the luxury of a focus on a beat any more.&rdquo;But he also reports that he is chipping away at resistance by educating his managers about what environmental coverage can be.&ldquo;They had an immediate impression it was a National Geographic kind of story,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;But it includes drought, vector-born illnesses, economic stories about the oceans, hurricanes and so on. The breadth of environmental stories is massive.&rdquo;Climate change stories are a hard sell now, but there is movement afoot to create partnerships for more climate change news as well as train in-house resources to cover global warming topics.Climate Central, a year-old nonprofit science and media organization, was created to provide &ldquo;clear and objective information about climate change and its potential solutions.&rdquo;Director of communications/senior research scientist Dr. Heidi Cullen, who formerly was a climate expert and correspondent for The Weather Channel, reports that Climate Central has already provided stories for &ldquo;News Hour With Jim Lehrer,&rdquo; Newsweek and Time.com, but the goal is to be able to provide more local stories.&ldquo;Our heart and soul is in developing relationships with news editors at local TV news markets,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;A huge majority of Americans get their news from local TV.&rdquo; Dr. Cullen reports that they&rsquo;re &ldquo;in the early phases&rdquo; of developing partnerships with local TV news outlets.At The Yale Forum on Climate Change &amp; The Media (climatemediaforum.yale.edu), editor Bud Ward has held two workshops on climate change for meteorologists and weathercasters from the American Meteorological Society &ldquo;to elevate the meteorologist within the station hierarchy to the role of scientist.&rdquo;&ldquo;The key thing is that the meteorologist/weathercaster is the only scientist most Americans see on a day-in, day-out basis,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re in the key position to help inform the public on complex issues related to and beyond weather.&rdquo;Even so, Dr. Cullen is the first to admit that environmental journalists have a long road to travel to educate the public. &ldquo;It&rsquo;ll take a long time, but we have to build up peoples&rsquo; baseline knowledge of what climate is,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re getting around that by telling locally based stories with strong scientific content.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Making the Most of the Crowded Freelance Market</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/making_the_most_of_the_crowded.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38282</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T18:14:36Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T18:22:55Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Jarre FeesSince the Internet reached its adolescence, both print and on-camera journalists have watched the gradual decline of the freelance market.But last year&rsquo;s economic collapse dealt a heavy blow to writers, editors, news anchors and others, who now find themselves in a free-falling market that is saturated with professionals.Many of those journalists were able to find freelance work last year, only to discover that this year&rsquo;s sinking market is much more crowded and, since no one knows how much further it is to the bottom, are being forced to pursue alternative employment.Unity: Journalists of Color&rsquo;s recently released 2009 Layoff Tracker Report found that there have been 46,599 U.S. journalism jobs lost since Jan. 1, 2008.The U.S. Department of Labor, in its Occupational Outlook Handbook 2008-2009, predicts little or no change in employment for journalists through 2016. That statistic, of course, doesn&rsquo;t include freelancers, who are already working just outside the system.Some journalists are trading their independence for more dependable lines of work &mdash; teaching jobs are available nationwide to qualified candidates. Other freelancers are turning to fields they&rsquo;ve always been interested in but never had a chance to explore.When WPEC-TV in West Palm Beach, Fla., did not renew news anchor Terry Anzur&rsquo;s contract in 2006 she said she welcomed the opportunity to return to Southern California, where she had previously served as co-anchor for KTLA-TV&rsquo;s &ldquo;News at Ten.&rdquo;Unable to find another on-air job, she started Terry Anzur Coaching Services in 2007 to coach on-camera talent for TV stations in the United States and Canada. Anzur said she &ldquo;had a great year in 2008, including four months preparing young journalists to cover the first multiparty democratic election in the Islamic Republic of Maldives,&rdquo; but characterized 2009 as &ldquo;a tough year because most stations have cut their training budgets to nothing.&rdquo;The evolution from print to Internet, Anzur said, is reminiscent of the earlier changeover from radio to television. &ldquo;The industry is still in transition,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;trying to figure out where the revenue streams are going to come from.&rdquo;Many freelancers are wondering whether those revenue streams are ever going to come at all.Entertainment journalist Robyn Flans, who spent five years writing for People magazine and has freelanced for a number of publications, said she believes the market downturn is permanent.&ldquo;All the magazines are folding,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;or everyone&rsquo;s using in-house writers. Publishers are going to see that, even if the economy bounces back, it was cost-effective to do it this way.&rdquo;Flans said she also feels the proliferation of Internet bloggers has hurt the freelance market. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s delegitimized the profession,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and made everybody a writer.&rdquo;Sportswriter Billy Witz, who was laid off at the Los Angeles Daily News in early 2008, found freelance work right away at The New York Times and several online venues, but said the market sagged in 2009.&ldquo;The print work was slow this summer,&rdquo; Witz said. &ldquo;And last fall I wrote a weekly piece for Fox Sports.com, but this year it&rsquo;s only three weeks out of four.&rdquo;Joe Grimm, who took a buyout from the Detroit Free Press at age 55 in 2008, publishes the journalism careers Web site, jobspage.com, teaches reporting and writing at Michigan State and contributes a blog to the Poynter Institute&rsquo;s Career Center.He said mid-career journalists face a particularly difficult challenge.Older journalists may be able to coast for their last few years and young journalists are getting trained now for the new jobs that are emerging,&rdquo; Grimm said, adding, &ldquo;At mid-career, we might forge a combination of both approaches. By all means, we can and must learn new skills: writing for the Web, shooting and editing video, learning to use social networks.&rdquo;Grimm noted that some mid-career journalists are more able than others to adapt to lower incomes. &ldquo;Making less money can work for savers whose kids have finished college,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It can mean stitching together a few smaller jobs that are part-time or long-distance. And it might mean a mix or layering of old skills and new.&rdquo;&ldquo;The journalists who have a very tough time are those who are in debt, who do not easily learn new things, who can't move or who are in the years when their expenses are at their highest,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sadly, most of us are in one or more of those circumstances.&rdquo;Dennis Liff, a long-time journalist in his mid-50s who worked as a sportswriter, news editor, copy editor and special projects editor in California, said he started preparing for a career change several years ago, before being laid off in 2008.&ldquo;I started working in video in 2004,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and started making a music documentary a few years later.&rdquo;Video editing lessons followed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m still in the stage of developing that skill,&rdquo; he said, adding that he and his wife have formed a video production company and are in the process of setting up family history project that they hope will eventually prove profitable.Other journalists are turning to writing books, but that field is also undergoing changes and, in any case, publishing deals have always been hard to come by.&ldquo;The skills that you have &mdash; writing on deadline, writing creatively and coherently &mdash; those are skills that translate to a lot of other industries,&rdquo; Witz said.&ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something about this calling that just gets in your blood and it&rsquo;s not easy to give up.&rdquo;Anzur said she thinks there will be a growing market for her on-camera coaching skills &ldquo;as more people have to appear on multimedia devices such as iPhones.&rdquo;She&rsquo;s also under contract for a college-level, multimedia textbook that she is co-writing. But Anzur makes it clear that she is &ldquo;very much a freelance journalist for hire.&ldquo;I would jump at the chance to host a show on-air or online, do talk radio or write a regular column,&rdquo; she said.Whether freelancers find work in the fields they know or move into new areas, Anzur had some practical advice. &ldquo;I think the important thing for freelancers to remember is that you are truly on your own,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;No agent is going to find a job for you. I am constantly networking for the next opportunity, and you never know where it&rsquo;s going to come from.&rdquo;Resources for Freelance JournalistsMediabistro.com offers tips on pitching stories to various publications, this month featuring Redbook, Marie Claire and Ladies' Home Journal. The site also offers a freelance marketplace (more than 1,100 freelancers are currently listed) and offers seminars or online courses in feature writing, food writing and writing for the Web, among other topics.Freelancewriting.com has job boards for writers, copy editors and copywriters; writing jobs to bid on; and a magazine guideline database. The site is a compilation of numerous other resources for writers, including CraigsList and Creative Circle.Writejobs.com has mostly Internet job postings. Be warned: Among the freelance opportunities available are assignments that pay $15 per article ($20 for health and fitness stories) and one job that pays $25 for a 500-word article.Thereview.com offers job listings for teachers and educational specialists, from kindergarten through college.jobspage.com gives practical advice on job interviews and negotiations, newsroom politics and summer internships.--Jarre Fees___________________________________________________________Tips for Struggling Freelancers:*Retrain if necessary and be willing to branch out.*Use industry and personal contacts.*Be flexible. Your skills might translate easily to another industry.*Tap into your inner freelancer to figure out what you really want to do with the next phase of your life. It might be time to try something new or pursue a discarded dream.--Jarre Fees]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Jarre FeesSince the Internet reached its adolescence, both print and on-camera journalists have watched the gradual decline of the freelance market.But last year&rsquo;s economic collapse dealt a heavy blow to writers, editors, news anchors and others, who now find themselves in a free-falling market that is saturated with professionals.Many of those journalists were able to find freelance work last year, only to discover that this year&rsquo;s sinking market is much more crowded and, since no one knows how much further it is to the bottom, are being forced to pursue alternative employment.Unity: Journalists of Color&rsquo;s recently released 2009 Layoff Tracker Report found that there have been 46,599 U.S. journalism jobs lost since Jan. 1, 2008.The U.S. Department of Labor, in its Occupational Outlook Handbook 2008-2009, predicts little or no change in employment for journalists through 2016. That statistic, of course, doesn&rsquo;t include freelancers, who are already working just outside the system.Some journalists are trading their independence for more dependable lines of work &mdash; teaching jobs are available nationwide to qualified candidates. Other freelancers are turning to fields they&rsquo;ve always been interested in but never had a chance to explore.When WPEC-TV in West Palm Beach, Fla., did not renew news anchor Terry Anzur&rsquo;s contract in 2006 she said she welcomed the opportunity to return to Southern California, where she had previously served as co-anchor for KTLA-TV&rsquo;s &ldquo;News at Ten.&rdquo;Unable to find another on-air job, she started Terry Anzur Coaching Services in 2007 to coach on-camera talent for TV stations in the United States and Canada. Anzur said she &ldquo;had a great year in 2008, including four months preparing young journalists to cover the first multiparty democratic election in the Islamic Republic of Maldives,&rdquo; but characterized 2009 as &ldquo;a tough year because most stations have cut their training budgets to nothing.&rdquo;The evolution from print to Internet, Anzur said, is reminiscent of the earlier changeover from radio to television. &ldquo;The industry is still in transition,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;trying to figure out where the revenue streams are going to come from.&rdquo;Many freelancers are wondering whether those revenue streams are ever going to come at all.Entertainment journalist Robyn Flans, who spent five years writing for People magazine and has freelanced for a number of publications, said she believes the market downturn is permanent.&ldquo;All the magazines are folding,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;or everyone&rsquo;s using in-house writers. Publishers are going to see that, even if the economy bounces back, it was cost-effective to do it this way.&rdquo;Flans said she also feels the proliferation of Internet bloggers has hurt the freelance market. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s delegitimized the profession,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and made everybody a writer.&rdquo;Sportswriter Billy Witz, who was laid off at the Los Angeles Daily News in early 2008, found freelance work right away at The New York Times and several online venues, but said the market sagged in 2009.&ldquo;The print work was slow this summer,&rdquo; Witz said. &ldquo;And last fall I wrote a weekly piece for Fox Sports.com, but this year it&rsquo;s only three weeks out of four.&rdquo;Joe Grimm, who took a buyout from the Detroit Free Press at age 55 in 2008, publishes the journalism careers Web site, jobspage.com, teaches reporting and writing at Michigan State and contributes a blog to the Poynter Institute&rsquo;s Career Center.He said mid-career journalists face a particularly difficult challenge.Older journalists may be able to coast for their last few years and young journalists are getting trained now for the new jobs that are emerging,&rdquo; Grimm said, adding, &ldquo;At mid-career, we might forge a combination of both approaches. By all means, we can and must learn new skills: writing for the Web, shooting and editing video, learning to use social networks.&rdquo;Grimm noted that some mid-career journalists are more able than others to adapt to lower incomes. &ldquo;Making less money can work for savers whose kids have finished college,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It can mean stitching together a few smaller jobs that are part-time or long-distance. And it might mean a mix or layering of old skills and new.&rdquo;&ldquo;The journalists who have a very tough time are those who are in debt, who do not easily learn new things, who can't move or who are in the years when their expenses are at their highest,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Sadly, most of us are in one or more of those circumstances.&rdquo;Dennis Liff, a long-time journalist in his mid-50s who worked as a sportswriter, news editor, copy editor and special projects editor in California, said he started preparing for a career change several years ago, before being laid off in 2008.&ldquo;I started working in video in 2004,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and started making a music documentary a few years later.&rdquo;Video editing lessons followed. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m still in the stage of developing that skill,&rdquo; he said, adding that he and his wife have formed a video production company and are in the process of setting up family history project that they hope will eventually prove profitable.Other journalists are turning to writing books, but that field is also undergoing changes and, in any case, publishing deals have always been hard to come by.&ldquo;The skills that you have &mdash; writing on deadline, writing creatively and coherently &mdash; those are skills that translate to a lot of other industries,&rdquo; Witz said.&ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something about this calling that just gets in your blood and it&rsquo;s not easy to give up.&rdquo;Anzur said she thinks there will be a growing market for her on-camera coaching skills &ldquo;as more people have to appear on multimedia devices such as iPhones.&rdquo;She&rsquo;s also under contract for a college-level, multimedia textbook that she is co-writing. But Anzur makes it clear that she is &ldquo;very much a freelance journalist for hire.&ldquo;I would jump at the chance to host a show on-air or online, do talk radio or write a regular column,&rdquo; she said.Whether freelancers find work in the fields they know or move into new areas, Anzur had some practical advice. &ldquo;I think the important thing for freelancers to remember is that you are truly on your own,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;No agent is going to find a job for you. I am constantly networking for the next opportunity, and you never know where it&rsquo;s going to come from.&rdquo;Resources for Freelance JournalistsMediabistro.com offers tips on pitching stories to various publications, this month featuring Redbook, Marie Claire and Ladies' Home Journal. The site also offers a freelance marketplace (more than 1,100 freelancers are currently listed) and offers seminars or online courses in feature writing, food writing and writing for the Web, among other topics.Freelancewriting.com has job boards for writers, copy editors and copywriters; writing jobs to bid on; and a magazine guideline database. The site is a compilation of numerous other resources for writers, including CraigsList and Creative Circle.Writejobs.com has mostly Internet job postings. Be warned: Among the freelance opportunities available are assignments that pay $15 per article ($20 for health and fitness stories) and one job that pays $25 for a 500-word article.Thereview.com offers job listings for teachers and educational specialists, from kindergarten through college.jobspage.com gives practical advice on job interviews and negotiations, newsroom politics and summer internships.--Jarre Fees___________________________________________________________Tips for Struggling Freelancers:*Retrain if necessary and be willing to branch out.*Use industry and personal contacts.*Be flexible. Your skills might translate easily to another industry.*Tap into your inner freelancer to figure out what you really want to do with the next phase of your life. It might be time to try something new or pursue a discarded dream.--Jarre Fees]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Murrow Winners Reflect Diversity of Style</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/murrow_winners_reflect_diversi.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38281</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T18:12:15Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T18:14:18Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Allison J. WaldmanThe Radio-Television News Directors Association &mdash; to officially become known as the Radio Television Digital News Association Oct. 13 &mdash; every year presents one of the industry&rsquo;s most important and valued awards honoring excellence in electronic journalism, the National Edward R. Murrow Award.This year&rsquo;s national winners in television, who will be presented with their awards Oct. 12 at the RTNDA&rsquo;s Edward R. Murrow Awards dinner in New York, represent a diversity of style, a commitment to excellence and an endeavor to emulate in many ways the work of the award&rsquo;s namesake, Edward R. Murrow.&ldquo;This is an award that really counts, it means an awful lot to all of us in our profession. The thing I like about the Murrow award is that the judging is done by our peers,&rdquo; said Steve Capus, president of NBC News, which earned five Murrow awards this year, including the award for overall excellence. &ldquo;Some of the best in our industry are the people who weigh in on these awards.&rdquo;NBC News&rsquo; &ldquo;American Story With Bob Dotson&rdquo; earned two Murrows, one for news series and the other for writing. The &ldquo;American Story&rdquo; series epitomizes the quality of television feature stories.&nbsp;This award-winning submission included tales about a 74-year-old street salesman who hawks potato peelers by day and lives in a posh Park Avenue apartment, and the mothers who tend to the graves of their soldier sons who now reside in Section 60 of Arlington cemetery.&ldquo;NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams&rdquo; received three Murrows: overall excellence; breaking news for &ldquo;Hurricane Gustav&rdquo;; and continuing coverage for &ldquo;Tip of the Spear.&rdquo;The latter is a series of stories by reporter Richard Engel documenting the work of Viper Company from the front line in Afghanistan.&ldquo;Richard is an old school reporter in a young body. He wants to be out there to see, feel, touch and smell what&rsquo;s going on,&rdquo; said Capus. &ldquo;Richard continues to report &lsquo;The Tip of the Spear&rsquo; stories even when he&rsquo;s not out there with them on the front line.&rdquo;Capus said Brian Williams&rsquo; award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 affected NBC News&rsquo; approach to Gustav.&ldquo;We were going to make a substantial commitment to this, not just because of what NBC News learned or Brian Williams learned, but what the country learned,&rdquo; said Capus. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t a bunch of people standing around being blown by hurricane force winds. You don&rsquo;t pick up an award like a Murrow for the theatrics of coverage. There needs to be some meat on those bones.&rdquo;CBS News&rsquo; &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; received three Murrows, as well as one for &ldquo;The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric&rdquo; (best newscast for Nov. 12, 2008). That night&rsquo;s broadcast covered stories about the government bailout, Mexican drug cartel violence, how Google could track the flu and revisited a classic Charles Kuralt on the road feature.The three &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; pieces were: for hard news, &ldquo;Exonerated&rdquo;; for feature reporting, &ldquo;Rex&rdquo;; and for investigative reporting, &ldquo;The Wasteland.&rdquo;&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in our 42nd season and some of the most powerful stories are the ones about people who were wrongly imprisoned,&rdquo; said &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; executive producer Jeff Fager. &ldquo;&lsquo;Exonerated&rsquo; is a great example, and what you see in this story is the impact that technology and science are starting to make in overturning such cases.&rdquo;Reporter Lesley Stahl worked with producer Shari Finkelstein on &ldquo;Rex,&rdquo; which was a follow-up to a previous &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; feature. Five years ago, Stahl met an 8-year-old boy named Rex, a musical savant, who&rsquo;d been born blind and brain damaged. &ldquo;Rex&rdquo; caught up with the young man today, at age 13.&ldquo;Lesley and Shari do great work together. This is a story that you never forget. It sticks with you. That&rsquo;s the mark of excellent journalism,&rdquo; said Fager. &ldquo;These are hard stories to tell, harder than I think most people realize because there&rsquo;s no natural beginning or end, so it&rsquo;s challenging too. It says a lot about Shari and Lesley&rsquo;s abilities to tell a story.&rdquo;In addition to the Murrow award, &ldquo;The Wasteland&rdquo; has won George Polk and Gerald Loeb awards, as well as honors from the Investigative Reporters and Editors and Sigma Delta Chi. Fager said the people in China who were running the electronic waste-dumping ground exposed in the report jumped CBS News&rsquo; Scott Pelley and his crew during production.&ldquo;They tried to get the tapes and physically force them off the site. It has all the classic elements of a great &lsquo;60 Minutes&rsquo; investigation. This is a story that would have made Edward R. Murrow very proud,&rdquo; said Fager.As to other winners, veteran TV reporter Linda Ellerbee was recognized in the category of news documentary for a piece she did for a nontraditional news outlet, her current home base, Nickelodeon&rsquo;s Nick News. Ellerbee was given a Murrow for the &ldquo;Nick News With Linda Ellerbee&rdquo; documentary &ldquo;Coming Home: When Parents Return From War,&rdquo; the story of returning soldiers as told from the perspective of their sons and daughters.ESPN won a Murrow in the category of sports reporting for another military themed story, &ldquo;Kick for Nick,&rdquo; about a fallen American soldier, Nick Madaras, in whose memory soccer balls were collected, sent to Iraq and distributed to children in response to his wish to share his love of the game with others.CNN received a Murrow for its Web site, CNN.com, and CTV News earned one for videography in &ldquo;Tibetan Horseman.&rdquo; ]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Allison J. WaldmanThe Radio-Television News Directors Association &mdash; to officially become known as the Radio Television Digital News Association Oct. 13 &mdash; every year presents one of the industry&rsquo;s most important and valued awards honoring excellence in electronic journalism, the National Edward R. Murrow Award.This year&rsquo;s national winners in television, who will be presented with their awards Oct. 12 at the RTNDA&rsquo;s Edward R. Murrow Awards dinner in New York, represent a diversity of style, a commitment to excellence and an endeavor to emulate in many ways the work of the award&rsquo;s namesake, Edward R. Murrow.&ldquo;This is an award that really counts, it means an awful lot to all of us in our profession. The thing I like about the Murrow award is that the judging is done by our peers,&rdquo; said Steve Capus, president of NBC News, which earned five Murrow awards this year, including the award for overall excellence. &ldquo;Some of the best in our industry are the people who weigh in on these awards.&rdquo;NBC News&rsquo; &ldquo;American Story With Bob Dotson&rdquo; earned two Murrows, one for news series and the other for writing. The &ldquo;American Story&rdquo; series epitomizes the quality of television feature stories.&nbsp;This award-winning submission included tales about a 74-year-old street salesman who hawks potato peelers by day and lives in a posh Park Avenue apartment, and the mothers who tend to the graves of their soldier sons who now reside in Section 60 of Arlington cemetery.&ldquo;NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams&rdquo; received three Murrows: overall excellence; breaking news for &ldquo;Hurricane Gustav&rdquo;; and continuing coverage for &ldquo;Tip of the Spear.&rdquo;The latter is a series of stories by reporter Richard Engel documenting the work of Viper Company from the front line in Afghanistan.&ldquo;Richard is an old school reporter in a young body. He wants to be out there to see, feel, touch and smell what&rsquo;s going on,&rdquo; said Capus. &ldquo;Richard continues to report &lsquo;The Tip of the Spear&rsquo; stories even when he&rsquo;s not out there with them on the front line.&rdquo;Capus said Brian Williams&rsquo; award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 affected NBC News&rsquo; approach to Gustav.&ldquo;We were going to make a substantial commitment to this, not just because of what NBC News learned or Brian Williams learned, but what the country learned,&rdquo; said Capus. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t a bunch of people standing around being blown by hurricane force winds. You don&rsquo;t pick up an award like a Murrow for the theatrics of coverage. There needs to be some meat on those bones.&rdquo;CBS News&rsquo; &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; received three Murrows, as well as one for &ldquo;The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric&rdquo; (best newscast for Nov. 12, 2008). That night&rsquo;s broadcast covered stories about the government bailout, Mexican drug cartel violence, how Google could track the flu and revisited a classic Charles Kuralt on the road feature.The three &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; pieces were: for hard news, &ldquo;Exonerated&rdquo;; for feature reporting, &ldquo;Rex&rdquo;; and for investigative reporting, &ldquo;The Wasteland.&rdquo;&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in our 42nd season and some of the most powerful stories are the ones about people who were wrongly imprisoned,&rdquo; said &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; executive producer Jeff Fager. &ldquo;&lsquo;Exonerated&rsquo; is a great example, and what you see in this story is the impact that technology and science are starting to make in overturning such cases.&rdquo;Reporter Lesley Stahl worked with producer Shari Finkelstein on &ldquo;Rex,&rdquo; which was a follow-up to a previous &ldquo;60 Minutes&rdquo; feature. Five years ago, Stahl met an 8-year-old boy named Rex, a musical savant, who&rsquo;d been born blind and brain damaged. &ldquo;Rex&rdquo; caught up with the young man today, at age 13.&ldquo;Lesley and Shari do great work together. This is a story that you never forget. It sticks with you. That&rsquo;s the mark of excellent journalism,&rdquo; said Fager. &ldquo;These are hard stories to tell, harder than I think most people realize because there&rsquo;s no natural beginning or end, so it&rsquo;s challenging too. It says a lot about Shari and Lesley&rsquo;s abilities to tell a story.&rdquo;In addition to the Murrow award, &ldquo;The Wasteland&rdquo; has won George Polk and Gerald Loeb awards, as well as honors from the Investigative Reporters and Editors and Sigma Delta Chi. Fager said the people in China who were running the electronic waste-dumping ground exposed in the report jumped CBS News&rsquo; Scott Pelley and his crew during production.&ldquo;They tried to get the tapes and physically force them off the site. It has all the classic elements of a great &lsquo;60 Minutes&rsquo; investigation. This is a story that would have made Edward R. Murrow very proud,&rdquo; said Fager.As to other winners, veteran TV reporter Linda Ellerbee was recognized in the category of news documentary for a piece she did for a nontraditional news outlet, her current home base, Nickelodeon&rsquo;s Nick News. Ellerbee was given a Murrow for the &ldquo;Nick News With Linda Ellerbee&rdquo; documentary &ldquo;Coming Home: When Parents Return From War,&rdquo; the story of returning soldiers as told from the perspective of their sons and daughters.ESPN won a Murrow in the category of sports reporting for another military themed story, &ldquo;Kick for Nick,&rdquo; about a fallen American soldier, Nick Madaras, in whose memory soccer balls were collected, sent to Iraq and distributed to children in response to his wish to share his love of the game with others.CNN received a Murrow for its Web site, CNN.com, and CTV News earned one for videography in &ldquo;Tibetan Horseman.&rdquo; ]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>SEJ 2009: Following Water's Flow</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/sej_2009_following_waters_flow.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38279</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T18:04:25Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T18:07:42Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanBig-name guests and a special focus on water will mark the 19th annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, being held from Oct. 7 to 11 in Madison, Wis.According to SEJ executive director Beth Parke, 820 people attended last year&rsquo;s conference in Roanoke, Va., but she anticipates a 20 percent drop in attendance this year, due to the recession.It&rsquo;s a tribute to this community that so many people do come to the conference,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;People take vacation time and spend their own money to get there.&rdquo;The conference will introduce attendees to some of the new faces and forces in the Obama administration. For the first time, a sitting Secretary of Agriculture &mdash; Tom Vilsack &mdash; will speak at the SEJ Conference. Also expected to speak, but not confirmed at press time, is Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Other high-level government speakers include Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; and Jane Lubchenco, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.With the 15th annual conference on climate change in Copenhagen only a few months away, the SEJ Conference will also closely examine climate change issues, with an opening plenary, &ldquo;Countdown to Copenhagen,&rdquo; kicked off by a keynote address by former Vice President Al Gore.The panel discussion that follows will be moderated by New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin and feature Sutley and Lubchenco; Changhua Wu, greater China director of The Climate Group; and James Rogers, chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy Corp.&ldquo;We have more big-name newsmakers than we have ever had,&rdquo; said SEJ director of annual conferences Jay Letto, a founding member of SEJ, who notes that author/farmer Wendell Berry, who became the group&rsquo;s 1,500th member at last year&rsquo;s Roanoke conference, will also be coming back.Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, Tia Nelson (daughter of late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day), former Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck and Native American professor and journalist Patty Loew will greet attendees at an opening &ldquo;Welcome to Wisconsin&rdquo; reception.&ldquo;Ms. Loew will talk about Native American efforts,&rdquo; said SEJ and conference co-chair Chuck Quirmbach. &ldquo;Native Americans are speaking with a loud voice about the environment, and we want to make sure their views are represented and that journalists interact more with tribes in their home states.&rdquo;University of Wisconsin-Madison, where John Muir once studied, is a sponsor and the locale of this year&rsquo;s conference. Situated on 1,000 acres and featuring its well-known Arboretum and the world&rsquo;s largest assemblage of Native American effigy mounds on a university campus, the University is home to the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and its Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.It also offers proximity to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and 15,000 lakes. That fact has prompted Quirmbach, environmental reporter at Wisconsin Public Radio, and fellow SEJ and conference co-chair Peter Annin, Institutes for Journalism &amp; Natural Resources and author of &ldquo;The Great Lakes Water Wars,&rdquo; to focus the conference on water.&ldquo;Water is a big part of our life here,&rdquo; said Quirmbach. &ldquo;The Great Lakes are a source of drinking water for 30 million people, so it is a natural starting point. We&rsquo;re addressing [water] topics that impact people from all over the U.S. and Canada.&rdquo;&ldquo;Water: The 21st Century&rsquo;s Most Valuable Resource?&rdquo; is the organizing principle of the conference, as reflected in the eponymous plenary session, moderated by Annin, and featuring Maude Barlow, senior adviser on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project; Mary Ann Dickinson, executive director of the Alliance for Water Efficiency; and Bob Hidell, chairman of Hidell-Eyster International, a consultant on issues facing the bottled water industry.One of the conference session themes is also devoted to water, with discussions on aquatic invasives; rehabilitation of the Great Lakes; continued violations of the Clean Water Act; and water supplies, diversion and the Great Lakes Compact. Other conference themes look at the climate, the economy, energy, natural resources and wildlife, pollution and environmental health, agriculture, and the environmental journalism craft.Another conference highlight will be field trips, including a cruise aboard the EPA research vessel Lake Guardian, with a discussion by scientists of the lake&rsquo;s ecological challenges and demonstration of water, aquatic life and sediment sampling techniques; and a tour the Great Lakes WATER Institute in Milwaukee, the largest academic freshwater research facility on the Great Lakes.Other trips will take attendees underground to see the Deep Tunnel project, Milwaukee&rsquo;s sewage overflow project, and for a ride on the lake in an NOA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric) vessel.There will be a trip to Horicon Marsh, one of Wisconsin&rsquo;s top birding sites, and a canoe trip down the Wisconsin River, marking the 20th anniversary of a preservation effort to protect the undeveloped and undammed reaches of the Lower Wisconsin River. &ldquo;There will be plenty of opportunities to get on Lake Michigan,&rdquo; said Quirmbach.Also featured is a post-SEJ Awards ceremony screening of &ldquo;Waterlife,&rdquo; a new film by director/writer Kevin McMahon that looks at the threats to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.The closing event is a tribute to Wisconsin favorite son Also Leopold, a pioneering environmentalist who eloquently articulated a commitment to an American land ethic. This year is also the 60th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book, &ldquo;A Sand County Almanac.&rdquo;Leopold, who once worked for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a nearby family get-away called the Shack. Following a Saturday night party at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center &mdash; the top LEED-certified building in the U.S. &mdash; a closing Sunday morning event will be held at the Shack.Curt Meine, director for Conservation Biology and History, Center for Humans and Nature, and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, will moderate a discussion on Leopold&rsquo;s legacy with Berry, Dombeck and one of Leopold&rsquo;s daughters, Nina Leopold Bradley, founder and director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Attendees will also be able to tour the world&rsquo;s largest restored prairie and the Arboretum&rsquo;s 4-acre Wisconsin native plant garden with its collection of nearly 500 native Wisconsin plants.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make a pilgrimage to the Shack,&rdquo; said, Quirmbach. &ldquo;Aldo Leopold brought innovative ideas and prairie restoration and wildlife management and was a very good writer as well. We hope his ideas still resonate today. Although he died more than 50 years ago, his ideas about conservation, preservation and the value of living things make him still a modern figure. We hope the members of SEJ will be interested in what his message was and how he structured it.&rdquo;An SEJ/Institutes for Journalism &amp; Natural Resources post-conference tour, led by IJNR President Frank Allen and IJNR Associate Director Annin, will take a select group of SEJ members to Wisconsin&rsquo;s northern forested lake country.The 20th SEJ Annual Conference in 2010 will take place Oct. 13-17, 2010, hosted by the University of Montana in Missoula. ]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
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   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanBig-name guests and a special focus on water will mark the 19th annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, being held from Oct. 7 to 11 in Madison, Wis.According to SEJ executive director Beth Parke, 820 people attended last year&rsquo;s conference in Roanoke, Va., but she anticipates a 20 percent drop in attendance this year, due to the recession.It&rsquo;s a tribute to this community that so many people do come to the conference,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;People take vacation time and spend their own money to get there.&rdquo;The conference will introduce attendees to some of the new faces and forces in the Obama administration. For the first time, a sitting Secretary of Agriculture &mdash; Tom Vilsack &mdash; will speak at the SEJ Conference. Also expected to speak, but not confirmed at press time, is Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Other high-level government speakers include Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality; and Jane Lubchenco, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and administrator, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.With the 15th annual conference on climate change in Copenhagen only a few months away, the SEJ Conference will also closely examine climate change issues, with an opening plenary, &ldquo;Countdown to Copenhagen,&rdquo; kicked off by a keynote address by former Vice President Al Gore.The panel discussion that follows will be moderated by New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin and feature Sutley and Lubchenco; Changhua Wu, greater China director of The Climate Group; and James Rogers, chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy Corp.&ldquo;We have more big-name newsmakers than we have ever had,&rdquo; said SEJ director of annual conferences Jay Letto, a founding member of SEJ, who notes that author/farmer Wendell Berry, who became the group&rsquo;s 1,500th member at last year&rsquo;s Roanoke conference, will also be coming back.Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, Tia Nelson (daughter of late Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day), former Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck and Native American professor and journalist Patty Loew will greet attendees at an opening &ldquo;Welcome to Wisconsin&rdquo; reception.&ldquo;Ms. Loew will talk about Native American efforts,&rdquo; said SEJ and conference co-chair Chuck Quirmbach. &ldquo;Native Americans are speaking with a loud voice about the environment, and we want to make sure their views are represented and that journalists interact more with tribes in their home states.&rdquo;University of Wisconsin-Madison, where John Muir once studied, is a sponsor and the locale of this year&rsquo;s conference. Situated on 1,000 acres and featuring its well-known Arboretum and the world&rsquo;s largest assemblage of Native American effigy mounds on a university campus, the University is home to the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and its Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment.It also offers proximity to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and 15,000 lakes. That fact has prompted Quirmbach, environmental reporter at Wisconsin Public Radio, and fellow SEJ and conference co-chair Peter Annin, Institutes for Journalism &amp; Natural Resources and author of &ldquo;The Great Lakes Water Wars,&rdquo; to focus the conference on water.&ldquo;Water is a big part of our life here,&rdquo; said Quirmbach. &ldquo;The Great Lakes are a source of drinking water for 30 million people, so it is a natural starting point. We&rsquo;re addressing [water] topics that impact people from all over the U.S. and Canada.&rdquo;&ldquo;Water: The 21st Century&rsquo;s Most Valuable Resource?&rdquo; is the organizing principle of the conference, as reflected in the eponymous plenary session, moderated by Annin, and featuring Maude Barlow, senior adviser on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project; Mary Ann Dickinson, executive director of the Alliance for Water Efficiency; and Bob Hidell, chairman of Hidell-Eyster International, a consultant on issues facing the bottled water industry.One of the conference session themes is also devoted to water, with discussions on aquatic invasives; rehabilitation of the Great Lakes; continued violations of the Clean Water Act; and water supplies, diversion and the Great Lakes Compact. Other conference themes look at the climate, the economy, energy, natural resources and wildlife, pollution and environmental health, agriculture, and the environmental journalism craft.Another conference highlight will be field trips, including a cruise aboard the EPA research vessel Lake Guardian, with a discussion by scientists of the lake&rsquo;s ecological challenges and demonstration of water, aquatic life and sediment sampling techniques; and a tour the Great Lakes WATER Institute in Milwaukee, the largest academic freshwater research facility on the Great Lakes.Other trips will take attendees underground to see the Deep Tunnel project, Milwaukee&rsquo;s sewage overflow project, and for a ride on the lake in an NOA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric) vessel.There will be a trip to Horicon Marsh, one of Wisconsin&rsquo;s top birding sites, and a canoe trip down the Wisconsin River, marking the 20th anniversary of a preservation effort to protect the undeveloped and undammed reaches of the Lower Wisconsin River. &ldquo;There will be plenty of opportunities to get on Lake Michigan,&rdquo; said Quirmbach.Also featured is a post-SEJ Awards ceremony screening of &ldquo;Waterlife,&rdquo; a new film by director/writer Kevin McMahon that looks at the threats to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.The closing event is a tribute to Wisconsin favorite son Also Leopold, a pioneering environmentalist who eloquently articulated a commitment to an American land ethic. This year is also the 60th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book, &ldquo;A Sand County Almanac.&rdquo;Leopold, who once worked for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had a nearby family get-away called the Shack. Following a Saturday night party at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center &mdash; the top LEED-certified building in the U.S. &mdash; a closing Sunday morning event will be held at the Shack.Curt Meine, director for Conservation Biology and History, Center for Humans and Nature, and senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation, will moderate a discussion on Leopold&rsquo;s legacy with Berry, Dombeck and one of Leopold&rsquo;s daughters, Nina Leopold Bradley, founder and director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Attendees will also be able to tour the world&rsquo;s largest restored prairie and the Arboretum&rsquo;s 4-acre Wisconsin native plant garden with its collection of nearly 500 native Wisconsin plants.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make a pilgrimage to the Shack,&rdquo; said, Quirmbach. &ldquo;Aldo Leopold brought innovative ideas and prairie restoration and wildlife management and was a very good writer as well. We hope his ideas still resonate today. Although he died more than 50 years ago, his ideas about conservation, preservation and the value of living things make him still a modern figure. We hope the members of SEJ will be interested in what his message was and how he structured it.&rdquo;An SEJ/Institutes for Journalism &amp; Natural Resources post-conference tour, led by IJNR President Frank Allen and IJNR Associate Director Annin, will take a select group of SEJ members to Wisconsin&rsquo;s northern forested lake country.The 20th SEJ Annual Conference in 2010 will take place Oct. 13-17, 2010, hosted by the University of Montana in Missoula. ]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>NewsPro's SEJ Poll: Job Resources, Warming Top of Mind </title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/newspros_sej_poll_job_resource.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38278</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T18:00:42Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T18:03:51Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanA new survey of environmental reporters indicates that their biggest challenge is the limited resources of their jobs and the most crucial issue they cover is global warming.The poll, conducted by NewsPro in conjunction with the Society of Environmental Journalists, also found that:&bull; They are encouraged by the American public&rsquo;s generally raised level of consciousness about green issues.&bull; They believe the advent of multimedia has had a great effect on the way they do their jobs.&bull; They think the amount of coverage their news organization devotes to environmental issues is on the rise.On the eve of the SEJ&rsquo;s 19th annual conference, NewsPro surveyed the organization&rsquo;s members on a number of questions central to coverage of environmental issues. Response rate to the online poll was about 10 percent, a return SEJ executive director Beth Parke characterized as &ldquo;healthy.&rdquo;A plurality of respondents (35.2 percent) answered that &ldquo;resources at my news organization&rdquo; topped the challenges. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time this year listening to reporters talk about what&rsquo;s happening in their newsrooms,&rdquo; said Parke.&ldquo;The resources answer has to do with how much time they get to report a story. It might not have to do with the amount of coverage they&rsquo;re being asked to do. Some of them are asked to do more because there are fewer people,&rdquo; said Parke.Bud Ward, editor of &ldquo;The Yale Forum on Climate Change &amp; The Media,&rdquo; notes that the response reflects &ldquo;a pink-slipping of newsrooms.&rdquo;&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not too surprising that that would be the first challenge,&rdquo; he said.Whereas 16.4 percent of respondents said &ldquo;job security&rdquo; was their chief challenge, 19.5 percent cited &ldquo;priority among news topics covered by my news organization.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s a challenge felt by WTVJ-TV special projects editor Jeff Burnside.&ldquo;Environmental stories are assigned a lower priority,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There is more pressure to cover the crime of the day. I was never full-time as an environmental journalist but it was more of a priority a few years back. That&rsquo;s less because of the green pendulum and more about our shrinking staff. That, and as management changed, so did priorities.&rdquo;A full 25 percent of respondents, however, listed &ldquo;other&rdquo; challenges in being an environmental journalist. That&rsquo;s the category that ABC correspondent Bill Blakemore counts himself in. &ldquo;In the minds of our editors, there is no category of what we do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s genuine unfamiliarity about how you cover this thing. My biggest challenge in covering global warming is to find ways to make a totally unprecedented kind of story feel approachable to my editors, my colleagues and my viewers.&rdquo;The second question asked what respondents viewed as the most important national environmental story over the next several years, with choices listed as global warming; peak oil/renewable energy; fresh water issues; agriculture/food systems; refugees from environmental disasters; and others.An overwhelming plurality &mdash; 50.4 percent &mdash; tagged global warming as the crucial issue. Water issues came in second in importance, at 17.4 percent, followed by peak oil/renewable energy at 14.9 percent. Agriculture/food issues rated a 5.8 percent response, and refugee issues a mere 0.8 percent. &ldquo;This says that these issues have truly gained prominence among reporters who are in a position to cover it,&rdquo; said Parke.But a full 10.7 percent of respondents answered &ldquo;other,&rdquo; and under that rubric, more than one respondent noted that &ldquo;all these issues are intertwined.&rdquo; Blakemore agrees. &ldquo;Hands down, global warming and the attendant ocean acidification,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Global warming is the envelope &mdash; quite literally &mdash; in which all these other issues live.&rdquo;&ldquo;Once you start looking at environmental issues, you see everything is connected to everything else,&rdquo; said Parke. &ldquo;People who cover the environment have to be aware of so many things. It&rsquo;s a kaleidoscopic beat.&rdquo;Global warming, however, still isn&rsquo;t an easy sell at the local station or local newspaper level. &ldquo;Climate change is called the story of the century, for good reason,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s the most difficult environmental story to do for TV, because it&rsquo;s visually challenging, and there&rsquo;s a presumption that it&rsquo;s not a local story.&rdquo;&ldquo;The Yale Forum&rsquo;s&rdquo; Ward also pointed out that mainstream legacy news organizations focus more on what&rsquo;s in the immediate area.&ldquo;Half the respondents put global climate change as the most important national story,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I question whether or not they would have climate change as the most important local story. It&rsquo;s usually seen as far off and far away in time. Polar bears, not Topeka.&rdquo;Indeed, one respondent who answered &ldquo;other,&rdquo; said that, &ldquo;for my readers, the most important issue is the restoration of the health of the [local bay] &mdash; water quality, fisheries, etc.&rdquo;A question that asked what was the most positive environmental trend in the U.S. drew an enthusiastic response: 45.4 percent named a &ldquo;general trend of raised consciousness about green issues.&rdquo;&ldquo;Local agriculture/locovore movement&rdquo; (eating food that is grown locally) drew an 18.5 percent response, and 9.2 percent named &ldquo;renewable energy at home, including weatherproofing, solar panels, light bulbs.&rdquo; Other possible answers included legislative initiatives (Cap and Trade, Cash for Clunkers, others) at 8.4 percent; green buildings at 5.9 percent; and recycling at 2.5 percent. Once again, 10.1 percent of respondents checked &ldquo;other,&rdquo; citing technology and biology R&amp;D, corporate America becoming more sustainable, and all types of energy conservation.Blakemore points to &ldquo;subnational governments&rdquo; as the most important trend. &ldquo;Although there was inattention and denial from the national level, at the state and local level, environmental issues were taken seriously,&rdquo; he said, observing that over 500 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, with a commitment to &ldquo;strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.&rdquo; Likewise, a group of governors and leaders from 30 states and territories formed the Governors&rsquo; Climate Coalition.Opinions about the value of raised consciousness differed dramatically among respondents. &ldquo;I think when you raise consciousness you invariably raise activity,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;When people in the mainstream are doing more green things in their personal lives, people are more aware and more open to coverage of green issues.&rdquo;Ward, however, believes that many people talk the talk, but don&rsquo;t walk the walk. &ldquo;People always say they&rsquo;re green,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But give them a choice between a fuel-efficient vehicle and an SUV, and they&rsquo;ve tended to go for the Hummer. It pays to be skeptical when people say they&rsquo;re environmentally responsible.&rdquo;Some respondents agreed with Ward&rsquo;s assessment. &ldquo;The big trends aren&rsquo;t very positive and the positive trends aren&rsquo;t very big,&rdquo; said one. Yet another focused on &ldquo;interest and commitment from Obama administration, but in context of poor economy&rdquo; as the trend to watch.In response to the question asking what the biggest change in job requirements has been in the past five years, 33.3 percent answered &ldquo;multimedia.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s as an underscoring of SEJ&rsquo;s efforts to increase multimedia savvy among its membership. &ldquo;It shows us what we can do with education, equipment support to help learning in that area,&rdquo; said Parke, who notes that preconference training sessions are already full.For Burnside, the biggest change has been &ldquo;doing more stories with fewer resources.&rdquo;&ldquo;I went from doing several stories over the course of several weeks to doing three stories in one day,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you subtract travel time and eating, that&rsquo;s 90 minutes to gather information, write and produce a story and get it on the air.&rdquo;Blakemore reports that he&rsquo;s doing Web and social networking tasks, but doesn&rsquo;t see that much of a change from when he started working as a correspondent in 1970. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m excited by new media, but my job requirements are the same,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always done a little print, a little radio, so it doesn&rsquo;t seem like that much of a change.&rdquo;Finally, respondents were asked if the amount of coverage dedicated to environmental issues at their news outlets was increasing or decreasing. A surprising 41 percent said it was increasing, with 35.9 saying it was staying the same, and only 23.1 percent saying it was decreasing.&ldquo;I suspect that coverage is not increasing at the large news organizations, which are going to a smaller news hole overall,&rdquo; said Ward. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re reducing page width, column inches, and broadcasters are reducing airtime. I think a large percentage of [the people who said coverage was increasing] comes from specialized outlets and not traditional media such as large metropolitan dailies.&rdquo;In concert with Ward&rsquo;s observation, Burnside said the amount of coverage at his station is decreasing.&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t say we&rsquo;re representing a national trend,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I can only speak for our particular circumstance. Budgets are crashing not just in newspapers but in TV, too. The staff is smaller and you have less chance to do comprehensive enterprise stories.&rdquo;Although Blakemore was reluctant to give a hard answer, he points out the impact of new media. &ldquo;On the Web, of course, it&rsquo;s increasing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;New digital multimedia platforms are helping coverage to increase.&rdquo;For Parke, the overwhelming take-away from the survey is a message she wants the membership to hear.&ldquo;SEJ is paying attention,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We want to continue to ask questions to be able to respond to where people see this field going and the advances that need to take place in terms of improving public understanding.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanA new survey of environmental reporters indicates that their biggest challenge is the limited resources of their jobs and the most crucial issue they cover is global warming.The poll, conducted by NewsPro in conjunction with the Society of Environmental Journalists, also found that:&bull; They are encouraged by the American public&rsquo;s generally raised level of consciousness about green issues.&bull; They believe the advent of multimedia has had a great effect on the way they do their jobs.&bull; They think the amount of coverage their news organization devotes to environmental issues is on the rise.On the eve of the SEJ&rsquo;s 19th annual conference, NewsPro surveyed the organization&rsquo;s members on a number of questions central to coverage of environmental issues. Response rate to the online poll was about 10 percent, a return SEJ executive director Beth Parke characterized as &ldquo;healthy.&rdquo;A plurality of respondents (35.2 percent) answered that &ldquo;resources at my news organization&rdquo; topped the challenges. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been spending a lot of time this year listening to reporters talk about what&rsquo;s happening in their newsrooms,&rdquo; said Parke.&ldquo;The resources answer has to do with how much time they get to report a story. It might not have to do with the amount of coverage they&rsquo;re being asked to do. Some of them are asked to do more because there are fewer people,&rdquo; said Parke.Bud Ward, editor of &ldquo;The Yale Forum on Climate Change &amp; The Media,&rdquo; notes that the response reflects &ldquo;a pink-slipping of newsrooms.&rdquo;&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not too surprising that that would be the first challenge,&rdquo; he said.Whereas 16.4 percent of respondents said &ldquo;job security&rdquo; was their chief challenge, 19.5 percent cited &ldquo;priority among news topics covered by my news organization.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s a challenge felt by WTVJ-TV special projects editor Jeff Burnside.&ldquo;Environmental stories are assigned a lower priority,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There is more pressure to cover the crime of the day. I was never full-time as an environmental journalist but it was more of a priority a few years back. That&rsquo;s less because of the green pendulum and more about our shrinking staff. That, and as management changed, so did priorities.&rdquo;A full 25 percent of respondents, however, listed &ldquo;other&rdquo; challenges in being an environmental journalist. That&rsquo;s the category that ABC correspondent Bill Blakemore counts himself in. &ldquo;In the minds of our editors, there is no category of what we do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s genuine unfamiliarity about how you cover this thing. My biggest challenge in covering global warming is to find ways to make a totally unprecedented kind of story feel approachable to my editors, my colleagues and my viewers.&rdquo;The second question asked what respondents viewed as the most important national environmental story over the next several years, with choices listed as global warming; peak oil/renewable energy; fresh water issues; agriculture/food systems; refugees from environmental disasters; and others.An overwhelming plurality &mdash; 50.4 percent &mdash; tagged global warming as the crucial issue. Water issues came in second in importance, at 17.4 percent, followed by peak oil/renewable energy at 14.9 percent. Agriculture/food issues rated a 5.8 percent response, and refugee issues a mere 0.8 percent. &ldquo;This says that these issues have truly gained prominence among reporters who are in a position to cover it,&rdquo; said Parke.But a full 10.7 percent of respondents answered &ldquo;other,&rdquo; and under that rubric, more than one respondent noted that &ldquo;all these issues are intertwined.&rdquo; Blakemore agrees. &ldquo;Hands down, global warming and the attendant ocean acidification,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Global warming is the envelope &mdash; quite literally &mdash; in which all these other issues live.&rdquo;&ldquo;Once you start looking at environmental issues, you see everything is connected to everything else,&rdquo; said Parke. &ldquo;People who cover the environment have to be aware of so many things. It&rsquo;s a kaleidoscopic beat.&rdquo;Global warming, however, still isn&rsquo;t an easy sell at the local station or local newspaper level. &ldquo;Climate change is called the story of the century, for good reason,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;But it&rsquo;s the most difficult environmental story to do for TV, because it&rsquo;s visually challenging, and there&rsquo;s a presumption that it&rsquo;s not a local story.&rdquo;&ldquo;The Yale Forum&rsquo;s&rdquo; Ward also pointed out that mainstream legacy news organizations focus more on what&rsquo;s in the immediate area.&ldquo;Half the respondents put global climate change as the most important national story,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I question whether or not they would have climate change as the most important local story. It&rsquo;s usually seen as far off and far away in time. Polar bears, not Topeka.&rdquo;Indeed, one respondent who answered &ldquo;other,&rdquo; said that, &ldquo;for my readers, the most important issue is the restoration of the health of the [local bay] &mdash; water quality, fisheries, etc.&rdquo;A question that asked what was the most positive environmental trend in the U.S. drew an enthusiastic response: 45.4 percent named a &ldquo;general trend of raised consciousness about green issues.&rdquo;&ldquo;Local agriculture/locovore movement&rdquo; (eating food that is grown locally) drew an 18.5 percent response, and 9.2 percent named &ldquo;renewable energy at home, including weatherproofing, solar panels, light bulbs.&rdquo; Other possible answers included legislative initiatives (Cap and Trade, Cash for Clunkers, others) at 8.4 percent; green buildings at 5.9 percent; and recycling at 2.5 percent. Once again, 10.1 percent of respondents checked &ldquo;other,&rdquo; citing technology and biology R&amp;D, corporate America becoming more sustainable, and all types of energy conservation.Blakemore points to &ldquo;subnational governments&rdquo; as the most important trend. &ldquo;Although there was inattention and denial from the national level, at the state and local level, environmental issues were taken seriously,&rdquo; he said, observing that over 500 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, with a commitment to &ldquo;strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.&rdquo; Likewise, a group of governors and leaders from 30 states and territories formed the Governors&rsquo; Climate Coalition.Opinions about the value of raised consciousness differed dramatically among respondents. &ldquo;I think when you raise consciousness you invariably raise activity,&rdquo; said Burnside. &ldquo;When people in the mainstream are doing more green things in their personal lives, people are more aware and more open to coverage of green issues.&rdquo;Ward, however, believes that many people talk the talk, but don&rsquo;t walk the walk. &ldquo;People always say they&rsquo;re green,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But give them a choice between a fuel-efficient vehicle and an SUV, and they&rsquo;ve tended to go for the Hummer. It pays to be skeptical when people say they&rsquo;re environmentally responsible.&rdquo;Some respondents agreed with Ward&rsquo;s assessment. &ldquo;The big trends aren&rsquo;t very positive and the positive trends aren&rsquo;t very big,&rdquo; said one. Yet another focused on &ldquo;interest and commitment from Obama administration, but in context of poor economy&rdquo; as the trend to watch.In response to the question asking what the biggest change in job requirements has been in the past five years, 33.3 percent answered &ldquo;multimedia.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s as an underscoring of SEJ&rsquo;s efforts to increase multimedia savvy among its membership. &ldquo;It shows us what we can do with education, equipment support to help learning in that area,&rdquo; said Parke, who notes that preconference training sessions are already full.For Burnside, the biggest change has been &ldquo;doing more stories with fewer resources.&rdquo;&ldquo;I went from doing several stories over the course of several weeks to doing three stories in one day,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;If you subtract travel time and eating, that&rsquo;s 90 minutes to gather information, write and produce a story and get it on the air.&rdquo;Blakemore reports that he&rsquo;s doing Web and social networking tasks, but doesn&rsquo;t see that much of a change from when he started working as a correspondent in 1970. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m excited by new media, but my job requirements are the same,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always done a little print, a little radio, so it doesn&rsquo;t seem like that much of a change.&rdquo;Finally, respondents were asked if the amount of coverage dedicated to environmental issues at their news outlets was increasing or decreasing. A surprising 41 percent said it was increasing, with 35.9 saying it was staying the same, and only 23.1 percent saying it was decreasing.&ldquo;I suspect that coverage is not increasing at the large news organizations, which are going to a smaller news hole overall,&rdquo; said Ward. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re reducing page width, column inches, and broadcasters are reducing airtime. I think a large percentage of [the people who said coverage was increasing] comes from specialized outlets and not traditional media such as large metropolitan dailies.&rdquo;In concert with Ward&rsquo;s observation, Burnside said the amount of coverage at his station is decreasing.&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t say we&rsquo;re representing a national trend,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I can only speak for our particular circumstance. Budgets are crashing not just in newspapers but in TV, too. The staff is smaller and you have less chance to do comprehensive enterprise stories.&rdquo;Although Blakemore was reluctant to give a hard answer, he points out the impact of new media. &ldquo;On the Web, of course, it&rsquo;s increasing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;New digital multimedia platforms are helping coverage to increase.&rdquo;For Parke, the overwhelming take-away from the survey is a message she wants the membership to hear.&ldquo;SEJ is paying attention,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We want to continue to ask questions to be able to respond to where people see this field going and the advances that need to take place in terms of improving public understanding.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Copenhagen Meet: A View From Afar</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/copenhagen_meet_a_view_from_af.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38277</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:56:06Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:58:32Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanAlthough the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) will be a hot spot of debate about how the world deals with global warming, few U.S. journalists, local or national, will be on hand &mdash; partly because of tighter budgets and partly because the conferences have historically proven difficult to cover on-scene.The meeting of policymakers, lobbyists and other interested parties will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from Dec. 7-18. It will be the 15th such conference since the 1995 Conference of Parties in Berlin.&ldquo;I wish we were going,&rdquo; says KING-TV news director Mark Ginther, whose Belo-owned NBC affiliated station in Seattle is one of a handful in the United States to have a reporter dedicated to the environmental beat &mdash; Gary Chittim. &ldquo;Being in Copenhagen would give us an edge. But it&rsquo;s not in the budget.&rdquo;A trip to Denmark isn&rsquo;t simply too big of a line item on the budget. Covering a cabal of international policymakers doesn&rsquo;t jibe with a local TV station&rsquo;s mission. &ldquo;Copenhagen is too big of a stretch to try to localize the story,&rdquo; says Jim Parsons, investigative reporter at ABC-affiliated WTAE-TV, a Hearst-owned station in Pittsburgh.Jeff Burnside, special projects producer at NBC O&amp;O WTVJ-TV in Miami, has closely covered environmental issues and climate change for many years, but he won&rsquo;t be on a plane to Denmark in December, either. &ldquo;Budgets have plummeted in local TV news beyond imagination,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;We hardly have the money for an hour&rsquo;s overtime, much less a trip to Copenhagen, and it&rsquo;s really affected our ability to report.&rdquo;&ldquo;We&rsquo;re relying on the national media to bring the Copenhagen story back,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;From there, we can localize it.&rdquo;Attending COP15 would be a natural for Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein, who has been covering climate change since 1998 when he joined Knight Ridder&rsquo;s Washington, D.C., bureau. Although he hasn&rsquo;t yet gotten the word from his AP bosses, he assumes he isn&rsquo;t going. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m more of a science reporter than a policy reporter,&rdquo; says Borenstein, who explains that AP&rsquo;s Charles Hanley has covered the UN Climate Change Conferences for many years.That underlines the fact that knowledge about climate change science isn&rsquo;t enough to make sense of a United Nations Climate Change Conference.&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all behind closed doors,&rdquo; says Society of Environmental Journalists President Christy George. &ldquo;You have to talk to people as they come out. It&rsquo;s really difficult to cover, a real monster.&rdquo;&ldquo;Copenhagen will be a zoo,&rdquo; agrees National Public Radio science correspondent Richard Harris, who has attended UN Climate Change Conferences since 1992 and will be in Copenhagen. Harris says he &ldquo;works the hallways. I find people I know, buttonhole them, and find out what they know and gradually build a story.&rdquo;New York Times science reporter Andrew C. Revkin notes the challenges in separating the spin from the truth. &ldquo;Most of what you hear publicly is posturing and not substantive,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;The forces at play behind closed doors can be lobbyists working for particular countries. The oil-producing countries are very influential in these talks, but they&rsquo;re not really visible. Over the years I&rsquo;ve tried to find people with access to particular delegations who can give me a sense of what&rsquo;s happening.&rdquo;Climate Conference vets are going to Copenhagen with enough context to make sense of the proceedings. Harris isn&rsquo;t optimistic about what he&rsquo;ll learn there. &ldquo;People who watch these things carefully think there is no way a meaningful deal will be cut there,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But [the participants] don&rsquo;t want to work on a Plan B because that would admit defeat. If they don&rsquo;t cut a deal and don&rsquo;t have a Plan B, then it&rsquo;s just a huge loss. And nobody wants this critical meeting to be a complete dud.&rdquo;That&rsquo;s too much policy, politics and hype for journalists who focus on the science of climate change. ABC correspondent Bill Blakemore &mdash; who notes that his specialty is &ldquo;the science of global warming and the science of the impact of that&rdquo; &mdash; is still uncertain as to whether he&rsquo;ll attend.&nbsp;&quot;It&rsquo;s possible, but I don&rsquo;t know if I would be most helpful in Copenhagen or somewhere else, providing context and perspective,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a topic to cover, for sure, but whether I&rsquo;m in Copenhagen or doing stories around it is a detail.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanAlthough the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) will be a hot spot of debate about how the world deals with global warming, few U.S. journalists, local or national, will be on hand &mdash; partly because of tighter budgets and partly because the conferences have historically proven difficult to cover on-scene.The meeting of policymakers, lobbyists and other interested parties will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from Dec. 7-18. It will be the 15th such conference since the 1995 Conference of Parties in Berlin.&ldquo;I wish we were going,&rdquo; says KING-TV news director Mark Ginther, whose Belo-owned NBC affiliated station in Seattle is one of a handful in the United States to have a reporter dedicated to the environmental beat &mdash; Gary Chittim. &ldquo;Being in Copenhagen would give us an edge. But it&rsquo;s not in the budget.&rdquo;A trip to Denmark isn&rsquo;t simply too big of a line item on the budget. Covering a cabal of international policymakers doesn&rsquo;t jibe with a local TV station&rsquo;s mission. &ldquo;Copenhagen is too big of a stretch to try to localize the story,&rdquo; says Jim Parsons, investigative reporter at ABC-affiliated WTAE-TV, a Hearst-owned station in Pittsburgh.Jeff Burnside, special projects producer at NBC O&amp;O WTVJ-TV in Miami, has closely covered environmental issues and climate change for many years, but he won&rsquo;t be on a plane to Denmark in December, either. &ldquo;Budgets have plummeted in local TV news beyond imagination,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;We hardly have the money for an hour&rsquo;s overtime, much less a trip to Copenhagen, and it&rsquo;s really affected our ability to report.&rdquo;&ldquo;We&rsquo;re relying on the national media to bring the Copenhagen story back,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;From there, we can localize it.&rdquo;Attending COP15 would be a natural for Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein, who has been covering climate change since 1998 when he joined Knight Ridder&rsquo;s Washington, D.C., bureau. Although he hasn&rsquo;t yet gotten the word from his AP bosses, he assumes he isn&rsquo;t going. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m more of a science reporter than a policy reporter,&rdquo; says Borenstein, who explains that AP&rsquo;s Charles Hanley has covered the UN Climate Change Conferences for many years.That underlines the fact that knowledge about climate change science isn&rsquo;t enough to make sense of a United Nations Climate Change Conference.&ldquo;It&rsquo;s all behind closed doors,&rdquo; says Society of Environmental Journalists President Christy George. &ldquo;You have to talk to people as they come out. It&rsquo;s really difficult to cover, a real monster.&rdquo;&ldquo;Copenhagen will be a zoo,&rdquo; agrees National Public Radio science correspondent Richard Harris, who has attended UN Climate Change Conferences since 1992 and will be in Copenhagen. Harris says he &ldquo;works the hallways. I find people I know, buttonhole them, and find out what they know and gradually build a story.&rdquo;New York Times science reporter Andrew C. Revkin notes the challenges in separating the spin from the truth. &ldquo;Most of what you hear publicly is posturing and not substantive,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;The forces at play behind closed doors can be lobbyists working for particular countries. The oil-producing countries are very influential in these talks, but they&rsquo;re not really visible. Over the years I&rsquo;ve tried to find people with access to particular delegations who can give me a sense of what&rsquo;s happening.&rdquo;Climate Conference vets are going to Copenhagen with enough context to make sense of the proceedings. Harris isn&rsquo;t optimistic about what he&rsquo;ll learn there. &ldquo;People who watch these things carefully think there is no way a meaningful deal will be cut there,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;But [the participants] don&rsquo;t want to work on a Plan B because that would admit defeat. If they don&rsquo;t cut a deal and don&rsquo;t have a Plan B, then it&rsquo;s just a huge loss. And nobody wants this critical meeting to be a complete dud.&rdquo;That&rsquo;s too much policy, politics and hype for journalists who focus on the science of climate change. ABC correspondent Bill Blakemore &mdash; who notes that his specialty is &ldquo;the science of global warming and the science of the impact of that&rdquo; &mdash; is still uncertain as to whether he&rsquo;ll attend.&nbsp;&quot;It&rsquo;s possible, but I don&rsquo;t know if I would be most helpful in Copenhagen or somewhere else, providing context and perspective,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a topic to cover, for sure, but whether I&rsquo;m in Copenhagen or doing stories around it is a detail.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Mixed Reviews for the New EPA</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/mixed_reviews_for_the_new_epa.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38275</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:48:19Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:52:01Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanWhen Barack Obama was elected president of the United States many environmental journalists felt optimistic that his call for transparency signaled easier days ahead for obtaining information from the Environmental Protection Agency.Now, nearly nine months into his administration, not everyone is sure that things have changed. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s way, way, way too early to judge how this administration is going to be on transparency issues,&rdquo; said Ken Ward, chair of the Society of Environmental Journalists&rsquo; First Amendment Task Force and a staff writer at The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. &ldquo;On the other hand, the EPA is still insisting that EPA staffers shouldn&rsquo;t be talking to the media, only PR people should. And they want questions in advance. If Obama believes in transparency, he&rsquo;ll issue an order to cease this.&rdquo;Under the Bush administration getting information from the EPA was slow and painful. &ldquo;It was difficult for our members to get information,&rdquo; said Ward. &ldquo;Freedom of Information Act requests were not handled in a timely manner. There were a lot of situations where EPA officials weren&rsquo;t allowed to talk to journalists and, when they were, the EPA insisted on having PR minders present.&rdquo;Things got so bad that in September 2005 SEJ&rsquo;s First Amendment Task Force issued a report, &ldquo;A Flawed Tool &mdash; Environmental Reporters&rsquo; Experiences With the Freedom of Information Act,&rdquo; and recommended that &ldquo;actions by Congress, journalists and the public to better ensure that this democratizing law is carried out faithfully.&rdquo;Fast-forward to 2009 and the new administration&rsquo;s EPA. OMB Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization formed in 1983 to shed light on the secrecy shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget, has stated that the Obama administration&rsquo;s high priority on transparency is bearing fruit most quickly at the EPA.&ldquo;Across a range of issues, the EPA is taking proactive steps to improve transparency, collecting and releasing to the public important environmental data needed to protect the environment and public health,&rdquo; said the report posted on Sept. 15. &ldquo;These actions, combined with instructions from the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, to operate more openly, are a distinct change from agency policies during the last several years.&rdquo;Still, not everyone is content. New York Times science writer Andrew C. Revkin has had only one experience trying to get information under the new administration&rsquo;s EPA, and it was not positive. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no easier under the new administration,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re no more forthcoming than they were under the Bush administration. They&rsquo;re very defensive and very slow on some things.&rdquo;Society of Environmental Journalists President Christy George, however, insists that &ldquo;the early signs have been good.&rdquo; She&rsquo;s referring to a conference call she&rsquo;s had with a number of EPA officials. &ldquo;We asked them to roll back some of the information they&rsquo;d been blacking out,&rdquo; she said. On Sept. 15, OMB Watch reported that the EPA released the Toxics Release Inventory, which tracks the release or transfer of more than 650 toxic chemicals from facilities nationwide, much earlier than the past administration.&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an ongoing conversation, written, personal and on the phone,&rdquo; said George, who reports that 10 public officers from various EPA regions are expected to attend this year&rsquo;s SEJ Conference.She notes, however, that SEJ also reached out to the Bush administration&rsquo;s EPA. &ldquo;The beginnings of the Bush administration was positive as well,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But after 9/11, one of the biggest problems SEJ had was that they shut down the Web sites and any information having to do with nuclear power plants, chemical plants, pipelines and dams.&rdquo;For many environmental journalists, however, FOIA requests are less significant than a relationship with officials much closer to home. &ldquo;Broad-brush stories about national issues are something we&rsquo;re not usually doing,&rdquo; said Jim Parsons, investigative reporter at WTAE-TV, an ABC-affiliated Hearst Television station in Pittsburgh. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re local TV so our job is to provide stories that impact communities in our viewing area. I submit FOIA requests on occasion, but I usually submit public record requests on a local and state level.&rdquo;Ward says that although he has personally had a couple of good experiences with FOIA requests from the new administration&rsquo;s EPA, he cautions journalists to be vigilant about how the EPA reacts to their FOIA requests over the coming months and years. &ldquo;The journalist&rsquo;s job is to hold that agency accountable and I think it&rsquo;s important that journalists make sure that we continue to do that. I hope my colleagues file a lot of FOIA requests and hold the EPA accountable to the president&rsquo;s promise of transparency.&rdquo;A case in point: When this journalist called the EPA for an official to speak on the record, the communications officer asked for the questions in advance, said that the EPA may only be able to speak on background, and then failed to provide an official to comment for this story.]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Debra KaufmanWhen Barack Obama was elected president of the United States many environmental journalists felt optimistic that his call for transparency signaled easier days ahead for obtaining information from the Environmental Protection Agency.Now, nearly nine months into his administration, not everyone is sure that things have changed. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s way, way, way too early to judge how this administration is going to be on transparency issues,&rdquo; said Ken Ward, chair of the Society of Environmental Journalists&rsquo; First Amendment Task Force and a staff writer at The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. &ldquo;On the other hand, the EPA is still insisting that EPA staffers shouldn&rsquo;t be talking to the media, only PR people should. And they want questions in advance. If Obama believes in transparency, he&rsquo;ll issue an order to cease this.&rdquo;Under the Bush administration getting information from the EPA was slow and painful. &ldquo;It was difficult for our members to get information,&rdquo; said Ward. &ldquo;Freedom of Information Act requests were not handled in a timely manner. There were a lot of situations where EPA officials weren&rsquo;t allowed to talk to journalists and, when they were, the EPA insisted on having PR minders present.&rdquo;Things got so bad that in September 2005 SEJ&rsquo;s First Amendment Task Force issued a report, &ldquo;A Flawed Tool &mdash; Environmental Reporters&rsquo; Experiences With the Freedom of Information Act,&rdquo; and recommended that &ldquo;actions by Congress, journalists and the public to better ensure that this democratizing law is carried out faithfully.&rdquo;Fast-forward to 2009 and the new administration&rsquo;s EPA. OMB Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization formed in 1983 to shed light on the secrecy shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget, has stated that the Obama administration&rsquo;s high priority on transparency is bearing fruit most quickly at the EPA.&ldquo;Across a range of issues, the EPA is taking proactive steps to improve transparency, collecting and releasing to the public important environmental data needed to protect the environment and public health,&rdquo; said the report posted on Sept. 15. &ldquo;These actions, combined with instructions from the EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, to operate more openly, are a distinct change from agency policies during the last several years.&rdquo;Still, not everyone is content. New York Times science writer Andrew C. Revkin has had only one experience trying to get information under the new administration&rsquo;s EPA, and it was not positive. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s no easier under the new administration,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re no more forthcoming than they were under the Bush administration. They&rsquo;re very defensive and very slow on some things.&rdquo;Society of Environmental Journalists President Christy George, however, insists that &ldquo;the early signs have been good.&rdquo; She&rsquo;s referring to a conference call she&rsquo;s had with a number of EPA officials. &ldquo;We asked them to roll back some of the information they&rsquo;d been blacking out,&rdquo; she said. On Sept. 15, OMB Watch reported that the EPA released the Toxics Release Inventory, which tracks the release or transfer of more than 650 toxic chemicals from facilities nationwide, much earlier than the past administration.&ldquo;There&rsquo;s an ongoing conversation, written, personal and on the phone,&rdquo; said George, who reports that 10 public officers from various EPA regions are expected to attend this year&rsquo;s SEJ Conference.She notes, however, that SEJ also reached out to the Bush administration&rsquo;s EPA. &ldquo;The beginnings of the Bush administration was positive as well,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But after 9/11, one of the biggest problems SEJ had was that they shut down the Web sites and any information having to do with nuclear power plants, chemical plants, pipelines and dams.&rdquo;For many environmental journalists, however, FOIA requests are less significant than a relationship with officials much closer to home. &ldquo;Broad-brush stories about national issues are something we&rsquo;re not usually doing,&rdquo; said Jim Parsons, investigative reporter at WTAE-TV, an ABC-affiliated Hearst Television station in Pittsburgh. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re local TV so our job is to provide stories that impact communities in our viewing area. I submit FOIA requests on occasion, but I usually submit public record requests on a local and state level.&rdquo;Ward says that although he has personally had a couple of good experiences with FOIA requests from the new administration&rsquo;s EPA, he cautions journalists to be vigilant about how the EPA reacts to their FOIA requests over the coming months and years. &ldquo;The journalist&rsquo;s job is to hold that agency accountable and I think it&rsquo;s important that journalists make sure that we continue to do that. I hope my colleagues file a lot of FOIA requests and hold the EPA accountable to the president&rsquo;s promise of transparency.&rdquo;A case in point: When this journalist called the EPA for an official to speak on the record, the communications officer asked for the questions in advance, said that the EPA may only be able to speak on background, and then failed to provide an official to comment for this story.]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Free Flow: Slow Go</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/free_flow_slow_go.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38276</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:47:30Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T20:45:09Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Elizabeth JensenFor proponents of efforts to pass a federal shield law, it&rsquo;s been a few months of one step forward, two steps back.&ldquo;Just when you think you&rsquo;re making some headway, something comes up that you weren&rsquo;t expecting,&rdquo; said Kevin Z. Smith, an assistant professor of journalism at Fairmont State University, in Fairmont, W.Va., and the new president of the Society of Professional Journalists.Those who are in favor of the Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect journalists and sources from government prying, were encouraged when the bill passed in the House by voice vote in March.But the Senate has proven to be a holdup. For two consecutive Thursdays in late September, the Judiciary Committee was unable to end debate and vote the bill out of committee. Despite distraction from the push to pass health care reform, as of Sept. 25, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was still insisting that the shield bill would get through, even if it takes some time.The bill, which is supported by about 70 journalism organizations including the Society of Environmental Journalists, endured a couple of major changes in amendments approved by the committee. Most notably, bloggers were excluded from the bill&rsquo;s protection, a disappointment to those hoping for a broad umbrella.Smith said supporters&rsquo; current task is to convince Justice Department staffers that their worries that the bill will hurt national security &ldquo;are not a concern. They are addressed in this bill.&rdquo;Joe Davis, who writes the Society of Environmental Journalists&rsquo; First Amendment WatchDog TipSheet, said the Obama administration &ldquo;has been supportive of a shield law. I think the issue is what kind of shield law.&rdquo;He added, &ldquo;I only hope the Democrats do what they said they would do during their various campaigns, and that was support reporters&rsquo; privilege. I think there&rsquo;s some hope for that.&rdquo;Stacey Woelfel, news director at KOMU-TV in Columbia, Mo., and the chairman of the Radio-Television News Directors Association (soon to be the Radio Television Digital News Association) agreed. &ldquo;I am more hopeful now than I have been in a long time,&rdquo; he said.He recalled an RTNDA board meeting with former President George W. Bush in the summer of 2006 where the issue was raised and the president &ldquo;shut it down right away.&rdquo;Now, he said, there is &ldquo;some hope that with the change in administration the White House is going to be a bit more open. We&rsquo;re still holding out hope on this.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Elizabeth JensenFor proponents of efforts to pass a federal shield law, it&rsquo;s been a few months of one step forward, two steps back.&ldquo;Just when you think you&rsquo;re making some headway, something comes up that you weren&rsquo;t expecting,&rdquo; said Kevin Z. Smith, an assistant professor of journalism at Fairmont State University, in Fairmont, W.Va., and the new president of the Society of Professional Journalists.Those who are in favor of the Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect journalists and sources from government prying, were encouraged when the bill passed in the House by voice vote in March.But the Senate has proven to be a holdup. For two consecutive Thursdays in late September, the Judiciary Committee was unable to end debate and vote the bill out of committee. Despite distraction from the push to pass health care reform, as of Sept. 25, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was still insisting that the shield bill would get through, even if it takes some time.The bill, which is supported by about 70 journalism organizations including the Society of Environmental Journalists, endured a couple of major changes in amendments approved by the committee. Most notably, bloggers were excluded from the bill&rsquo;s protection, a disappointment to those hoping for a broad umbrella.Smith said supporters&rsquo; current task is to convince Justice Department staffers that their worries that the bill will hurt national security &ldquo;are not a concern. They are addressed in this bill.&rdquo;Joe Davis, who writes the Society of Environmental Journalists&rsquo; First Amendment WatchDog TipSheet, said the Obama administration &ldquo;has been supportive of a shield law. I think the issue is what kind of shield law.&rdquo;He added, &ldquo;I only hope the Democrats do what they said they would do during their various campaigns, and that was support reporters&rsquo; privilege. I think there&rsquo;s some hope for that.&rdquo;Stacey Woelfel, news director at KOMU-TV in Columbia, Mo., and the chairman of the Radio-Television News Directors Association (soon to be the Radio Television Digital News Association) agreed. &ldquo;I am more hopeful now than I have been in a long time,&rdquo; he said.He recalled an RTNDA board meeting with former President George W. Bush in the summer of 2006 where the issue was raised and the president &ldquo;shut it down right away.&rdquo;Now, he said, there is &ldquo;some hope that with the change in administration the White House is going to be a bit more open. We&rsquo;re still holding out hope on this.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Humor Scores Serious Points</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/humor_scores_serious_points.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38274</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:46:32Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:48:02Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Elizabeth JensenSo why did the chicken cross the road? To get viewers and readers to pay attention to gloom-and-doom environmental stories, of course.Melting icebergs and dying polar bears are sad and scary stories; eyes glaze over when clean coal technology is dissected; and a few scientists just take themselves a bit too seriously. For some journalists, clear and concise writing isn&rsquo;t enough, so they are using humor to get media consumers to tune in to complicated, oftentimes, grim subjects.Humor &ldquo;helps audiences connect with the story by letting them see the humanity in it. Everyone somewhere in their bones laughs,&rdquo; said Debra Schwartz, chief executive of Dash on Deadline, a free-lance writing service specializing in science, environment and education journalism. She added, &ldquo;When we can help each other laugh at ourselves, then there&rsquo;s an emotional connection to the story that doesn&rsquo;t exist when you&rsquo;re hammering someone over the head. I don&rsquo;t think laying a guilt trip on somebody is a way to make them productive.&rdquo;Schwartz, the Beloit, Wis.-based author of &ldquo;Writing Green: Advocacy &amp; Investigative Reporting About the Environment in the Early 21st Century,&rdquo; will lead a Friday Society of Environmental Journalists conference panel on how, why and when to use humor in environmental writing.A lot of science, energy and environmental material &ldquo;is very dry and drab,&rdquo; said Tom Henry, a writer and columnist for the Toledo Blade in Ohio, who has been covering the environmental beat since 1993 and will be on the panel. Journalists, he said, &ldquo;have the power to inflame a community needlessly or put them to sleep&rdquo; when they should be paying close attention. Humor can be one way to bring nuance to a story as well as to whet readers&rsquo; appetites for more details, he added.Grist.org, which calls itself &ldquo;a beacon in the smog,&rdquo; has been using a humorous approach to its environmental posts since 1999. Newsweek called the Seattle-based site &mdash; which reaches about 750,000 users a month and features a &ldquo;Things That Are Funny&rdquo; category and a &ldquo;Clarity-O-Meter&rdquo; alongside serious policy coverage &mdash; &ldquo;the &lsquo;Daily Show&rsquo; of the green space.&rdquo;In a tip sheet for the SEJ panel, Grist senior editor Katharine Wroth offers examples of ways to use humor, from incorporating rhymes and wordplay and &ldquo;writing for yourself&rdquo; and what you think is funny, to a suggestion to &ldquo;Butcher your sacred cows.&rdquo; No topic, she writes, is so important that it can&rsquo;t be tweaked: &ldquo;Methane in the atmosphere? Not so funny. Bovine burps as a source of said methane? Now we&rsquo;re talking.&rdquo;She also suggests going &ldquo;for the unexpected,&rdquo; citing a recent Grist slideshow of famous environmentalists&rsquo; mustaches, which the site used as &ldquo;a chance to highlight key thinkers doing important work on sustainability &mdash; in a way that caught people completely off guard.&rdquo;Another good tool, she says, is to ask &ldquo;WWJSD&rdquo; (What Would Jon Stewart Do?), suggesting that journalists &ldquo;Imagine Jon Stewart or some other comedian you admire delivering your story. How would he or she spice things up? What unexpected, unserious angle would he or she focus in on?&rdquo;But not all humorous approaches have to be pure stand-up comedy routines, say Henry and Schwartz. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t have to be an entertainer to write in a sequence of threes,&rdquo; said Schwartz, referring to one technique of using &ldquo;Small, bigger, bigger&rdquo; or &ldquo;Big, smaller, smaller&rdquo; formulas.&ldquo;What you&rsquo;re really trying to do is lighten up your writing a bit,&rdquo; says Henry. He wrote a story once about efforts to eradicate emerald ash borers by peeling back the bark on some trees and releasing pheromones, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t say the trees are sluts, or anything like that,&rdquo; he noted.Deciding when humor isn&rsquo;t appropriate is also key, he said, noting that &ldquo;Humor usually doesn&rsquo;t fly when you&rsquo;ve got someone being prosecuted in court,&rdquo; or there&rsquo;s a spill or disaster. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to be accused of being flippant. That&rsquo;s always the danger.&rdquo;&ldquo;It is possible to offend somebody unintentionally,&rdquo; said Schwartz. &ldquo;Sensitivity is the order of the day. Sometimes humor can have a hard edge that turns people off.&rdquo; She occasionally uses a bit of humor at the top of a story to engage her readers before getting to the nitty-gritty details of her topic. And not everyone gets it. She once wrote a story about textiles created from spun petroleum with a lead along the lines of &ldquo;Save oil, go naked.&rdquo; An editor didn&rsquo;t understand, and the story was rejected, but Schwartz still thinks it was a good approach to a materials science story, &ldquo;which can be really boring.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Elizabeth JensenSo why did the chicken cross the road? To get viewers and readers to pay attention to gloom-and-doom environmental stories, of course.Melting icebergs and dying polar bears are sad and scary stories; eyes glaze over when clean coal technology is dissected; and a few scientists just take themselves a bit too seriously. For some journalists, clear and concise writing isn&rsquo;t enough, so they are using humor to get media consumers to tune in to complicated, oftentimes, grim subjects.Humor &ldquo;helps audiences connect with the story by letting them see the humanity in it. Everyone somewhere in their bones laughs,&rdquo; said Debra Schwartz, chief executive of Dash on Deadline, a free-lance writing service specializing in science, environment and education journalism. She added, &ldquo;When we can help each other laugh at ourselves, then there&rsquo;s an emotional connection to the story that doesn&rsquo;t exist when you&rsquo;re hammering someone over the head. I don&rsquo;t think laying a guilt trip on somebody is a way to make them productive.&rdquo;Schwartz, the Beloit, Wis.-based author of &ldquo;Writing Green: Advocacy &amp; Investigative Reporting About the Environment in the Early 21st Century,&rdquo; will lead a Friday Society of Environmental Journalists conference panel on how, why and when to use humor in environmental writing.A lot of science, energy and environmental material &ldquo;is very dry and drab,&rdquo; said Tom Henry, a writer and columnist for the Toledo Blade in Ohio, who has been covering the environmental beat since 1993 and will be on the panel. Journalists, he said, &ldquo;have the power to inflame a community needlessly or put them to sleep&rdquo; when they should be paying close attention. Humor can be one way to bring nuance to a story as well as to whet readers&rsquo; appetites for more details, he added.Grist.org, which calls itself &ldquo;a beacon in the smog,&rdquo; has been using a humorous approach to its environmental posts since 1999. Newsweek called the Seattle-based site &mdash; which reaches about 750,000 users a month and features a &ldquo;Things That Are Funny&rdquo; category and a &ldquo;Clarity-O-Meter&rdquo; alongside serious policy coverage &mdash; &ldquo;the &lsquo;Daily Show&rsquo; of the green space.&rdquo;In a tip sheet for the SEJ panel, Grist senior editor Katharine Wroth offers examples of ways to use humor, from incorporating rhymes and wordplay and &ldquo;writing for yourself&rdquo; and what you think is funny, to a suggestion to &ldquo;Butcher your sacred cows.&rdquo; No topic, she writes, is so important that it can&rsquo;t be tweaked: &ldquo;Methane in the atmosphere? Not so funny. Bovine burps as a source of said methane? Now we&rsquo;re talking.&rdquo;She also suggests going &ldquo;for the unexpected,&rdquo; citing a recent Grist slideshow of famous environmentalists&rsquo; mustaches, which the site used as &ldquo;a chance to highlight key thinkers doing important work on sustainability &mdash; in a way that caught people completely off guard.&rdquo;Another good tool, she says, is to ask &ldquo;WWJSD&rdquo; (What Would Jon Stewart Do?), suggesting that journalists &ldquo;Imagine Jon Stewart or some other comedian you admire delivering your story. How would he or she spice things up? What unexpected, unserious angle would he or she focus in on?&rdquo;But not all humorous approaches have to be pure stand-up comedy routines, say Henry and Schwartz. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t have to be an entertainer to write in a sequence of threes,&rdquo; said Schwartz, referring to one technique of using &ldquo;Small, bigger, bigger&rdquo; or &ldquo;Big, smaller, smaller&rdquo; formulas.&ldquo;What you&rsquo;re really trying to do is lighten up your writing a bit,&rdquo; says Henry. He wrote a story once about efforts to eradicate emerald ash borers by peeling back the bark on some trees and releasing pheromones, &ldquo;but I don&rsquo;t say the trees are sluts, or anything like that,&rdquo; he noted.Deciding when humor isn&rsquo;t appropriate is also key, he said, noting that &ldquo;Humor usually doesn&rsquo;t fly when you&rsquo;ve got someone being prosecuted in court,&rdquo; or there&rsquo;s a spill or disaster. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to be accused of being flippant. That&rsquo;s always the danger.&rdquo;&ldquo;It is possible to offend somebody unintentionally,&rdquo; said Schwartz. &ldquo;Sensitivity is the order of the day. Sometimes humor can have a hard edge that turns people off.&rdquo; She occasionally uses a bit of humor at the top of a story to engage her readers before getting to the nitty-gritty details of her topic. And not everyone gets it. She once wrote a story about textiles created from spun petroleum with a lead along the lines of &ldquo;Save oil, go naked.&rdquo; An editor didn&rsquo;t understand, and the story was rejected, but Schwartz still thinks it was a good approach to a materials science story, &ldquo;which can be really boring.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Environmental Journalists Adapt to Life After Layoffs</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/environmental_journalists_adap.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38273</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:42:16Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:45:48Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Dinah EngIndustry layoffs and an economic downturn have sidelined thousands of journalists in the last year, forcing many who covered the environment to find new ways to make a living.Reporters who once worked to raise public awareness of environmental issues are now creating entrepreneurial ventures online, working for government agencies or nonprofits, and teaching.Most have moved into some kind of freelance career.&ldquo;Our membership continues to grow, which may seem counterintuitive,&rdquo; says Beth Parke, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Jenkintown, Pa. &ldquo;Like many other journalism organizations in this difficult period, our people are growing their networks and shoring up their skills.&ldquo;Where there are newspapers with commitments to environmental coverage &mdash; where they may have had three people on the beat &mdash; now they have one. There&rsquo;s less time and less space for it. That said, there&rsquo;s still award-winning work being done.&rdquo;Parke says the single largest employment category in membership shifted from &ldquo;newspaper&rdquo; in January 2008 to &ldquo;freelance&rdquo; in July 2009. In June 2007, SEJ had 309 working freelance, compared with 355 working freelance across all platforms in June 2008. As of July 2009, SEJ had 1,520 members.She notes that numerous opportunities exist for environmental journalists, including working for outlets that may cover the environment with focused points of view, such as Greenpeace Magazine or Clear Skies TV.&ldquo;The skills that print and broadcast journalists have are valuable in government, public relations and universities,&rdquo; Parke says. &ldquo;People can teach or write books. What we&rsquo;re concerned about is where is the public going to get their news? SEJ is doing what we can to promote the idea of the nonprofit news model, and being a business incubator that helps journalists set up entrepreneurial ventures.&rdquo;Robert McClure, an SEJ board member and longtime environmental reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was one of the first to move into the nonprofit news sector. When the Post-Intelligencer stopped its print editions in March 2009, McClure joined forces with other former staffers to launch InvestigateWest (invw.org), a nonprofit news venture online.&ldquo;We want to preserve and modernize investigative reporting in Western North America &mdash; including Canada and Mexico &mdash; on the environment, public health and social justice issues,&rdquo; says McClure, vice president of InvestigateWest. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re doing one project a month, and have media partners that will pay for the stories. We&rsquo;ll be getting money from philanthropic organizations, and later from the public as donors.&rdquo;McClure, who covers climate change and other environmental news topics in his blog Dateline Earth, says he&rsquo;s working as hard now as he did on the multipart projects he did at the Post-Intelligencer on mining, endangered species and the need for environmental restoration of Puget Sound and the Duwamish River.&ldquo;We can only cover 12 stories a year, but there&rsquo;s a place for us,&rdquo; he says &ldquo;I hope we&rsquo;re pioneering a new way to do journalism.&rdquo;Chris Bowman, former environment and energy reporter for The Sacramento Bee, has carved out a new niche for himself after being laid off in May by combining a full-time job with the California Environmental Protection Agency, teaching and freelance writing.&ldquo;I write and edit scientific reports, press releases and legislative bill analyses for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment,&rdquo; Bowman says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m teaching a course on environmental news reporting and writing for graduate students at the University of Nevada at Reno on my furlough Fridays, and I pull together a monthly newsletter on the latest green automotive technology for a Silicon Valley public relations firm. I&rsquo;m fortunate that it does tap some of my skills, and keeps me in the swim of things.&rdquo;Bowman says The Sacramento Bee has been in the forefront of environmental reporting, but early on, editors tended to view environmental reporting with suspicion as advocacy reporting. Today, having one or more dedicated environmental reporters on staff is still seen as a luxury, rather than necessity, he adds.&ldquo;Having one person cover the beat is like having one person cover all sports or the state capitol,&rdquo; Bowman says. &ldquo;Now that I&rsquo;m working at Cal EPA, and scientists are freely talking to me, I see so many stories. But there are fewer reporters I can turn to who would do the story justice.&ldquo;With climate change becoming a part of mainstream news and education, editors can no longer ignore environmental reporting. The demand is there, but the industry hasn&rsquo;t figured out how to make money off it.&rdquo;Miles O&rsquo;Brien, CNN&rsquo;s environment and technology correspondent until the cable network disbanded its science, technology and environment unit in December 2008, is creating an income stream with nonprofit Spaceflightnow.com, an online venture that provides space coverage.O&rsquo;Brien approached Spaceflightnow.com and suggested continuous video coverage of STS-119, the space shuttle that launched March 15. He found sponsors for the initiative and served as anchor/host for the Webcast, which has covered three other shuttle launches since.&ldquo;We had 190,000 unique visitors for the last launch (STS-128),&rdquo; O&rsquo;Brien says. &ldquo;It was really gratifying. We&rsquo;re in a new era of hyperspecialization with a lot of little audiences. Tweet a little bit, put it on Facebook, and the world will beat a path to your door.&rdquo;O&rsquo;Brien, who worked for CNN for nearly 17 years, continues to work on documentaries for PBS and a blog. He says interest in environmental stories on air is difficult to maintain because topics like global change are big, but don&rsquo;t necessarily lend themselves to visual storytelling.&ldquo;Mainstream media has walked away from the subject matter, but there are opportunities to tell the story in other mediums,&rdquo; he says.The Internet has welcomed many environmental reporters, such as Jane Kay, a longtime environmental writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who lost her job July 31 as part of a large reduction in force at the paper.&ldquo;I&rsquo;m writing for Environmental Health News (environmentalhealthnews.org), a sister site to DailyClimate.org, based on the Pro Publica model,&rdquo; Kay says. &ldquo;EHN started in 2002 as an aggregator of stories, and in the last year it&rsquo;s started commissioning original journalism. So as print reporters leave their papers, they&rsquo;re ending up at places like this. It&rsquo;s going to be up to the reader to figure out where to go now for their news.&rdquo;Kay says environmental journalists, who are knowledgeable about state and federal environmental laws and ecological issues, are concerned about diminishing public access to objective information.&ldquo;This is a time when our planet is facing great environmental problems, and we need sophisticated examinations of how we&rsquo;re going to address these problems,&rdquo; Kay says. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t want to lose this knowledge that&rsquo;s taken so long to build.&rdquo;While downsizing has pushed veterans like Camille Feanny, former CNN global environmental producer, to leave the business to pursue other passions &mdash; she is pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Florida, and plans to work on global orphan issues &mdash; some have kept one foot in traditional journalism while blazing trails with new methods of environmental reporting.Paul Rogers, resources and environment writer at the San Jose Mercury News, combines a 30-hour, part-time job at the newspaper, with a 20-hour part-time job as managing editor of public broadcast station KQED-TV&rsquo;s Quest, a multimedia series that explores Northern California science, environment and nature through podcasting, radio and educational materials for teachers.Four years ago, Rogers asked the Mercury News to cut his hours so that he could take on the new initiative with KQED, an arrangement that has worked well for all involved. Rogers notes that the newspaper gets the benefit of embedding Quest videos shot in hi-def into his stories on the newspaper Web site, and KQED gets more eyeballs on their work.It&rsquo;s likely that we&rsquo;ll see more newspapers go bankrupt, or cease publishing on dead trees,&rdquo; Rogers says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been intrigued with public broadcasting alternatives because at KQED we&rsquo;re able to cover stories with a different revenue model. Maybe some of the future models for environmental coverage will be these nonprofit models. If this is how we keep environmental reporting alive, so be it.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Dinah EngIndustry layoffs and an economic downturn have sidelined thousands of journalists in the last year, forcing many who covered the environment to find new ways to make a living.Reporters who once worked to raise public awareness of environmental issues are now creating entrepreneurial ventures online, working for government agencies or nonprofits, and teaching.Most have moved into some kind of freelance career.&ldquo;Our membership continues to grow, which may seem counterintuitive,&rdquo; says Beth Parke, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Jenkintown, Pa. &ldquo;Like many other journalism organizations in this difficult period, our people are growing their networks and shoring up their skills.&ldquo;Where there are newspapers with commitments to environmental coverage &mdash; where they may have had three people on the beat &mdash; now they have one. There&rsquo;s less time and less space for it. That said, there&rsquo;s still award-winning work being done.&rdquo;Parke says the single largest employment category in membership shifted from &ldquo;newspaper&rdquo; in January 2008 to &ldquo;freelance&rdquo; in July 2009. In June 2007, SEJ had 309 working freelance, compared with 355 working freelance across all platforms in June 2008. As of July 2009, SEJ had 1,520 members.She notes that numerous opportunities exist for environmental journalists, including working for outlets that may cover the environment with focused points of view, such as Greenpeace Magazine or Clear Skies TV.&ldquo;The skills that print and broadcast journalists have are valuable in government, public relations and universities,&rdquo; Parke says. &ldquo;People can teach or write books. What we&rsquo;re concerned about is where is the public going to get their news? SEJ is doing what we can to promote the idea of the nonprofit news model, and being a business incubator that helps journalists set up entrepreneurial ventures.&rdquo;Robert McClure, an SEJ board member and longtime environmental reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, was one of the first to move into the nonprofit news sector. When the Post-Intelligencer stopped its print editions in March 2009, McClure joined forces with other former staffers to launch InvestigateWest (invw.org), a nonprofit news venture online.&ldquo;We want to preserve and modernize investigative reporting in Western North America &mdash; including Canada and Mexico &mdash; on the environment, public health and social justice issues,&rdquo; says McClure, vice president of InvestigateWest. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re doing one project a month, and have media partners that will pay for the stories. We&rsquo;ll be getting money from philanthropic organizations, and later from the public as donors.&rdquo;McClure, who covers climate change and other environmental news topics in his blog Dateline Earth, says he&rsquo;s working as hard now as he did on the multipart projects he did at the Post-Intelligencer on mining, endangered species and the need for environmental restoration of Puget Sound and the Duwamish River.&ldquo;We can only cover 12 stories a year, but there&rsquo;s a place for us,&rdquo; he says &ldquo;I hope we&rsquo;re pioneering a new way to do journalism.&rdquo;Chris Bowman, former environment and energy reporter for The Sacramento Bee, has carved out a new niche for himself after being laid off in May by combining a full-time job with the California Environmental Protection Agency, teaching and freelance writing.&ldquo;I write and edit scientific reports, press releases and legislative bill analyses for the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment,&rdquo; Bowman says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m teaching a course on environmental news reporting and writing for graduate students at the University of Nevada at Reno on my furlough Fridays, and I pull together a monthly newsletter on the latest green automotive technology for a Silicon Valley public relations firm. I&rsquo;m fortunate that it does tap some of my skills, and keeps me in the swim of things.&rdquo;Bowman says The Sacramento Bee has been in the forefront of environmental reporting, but early on, editors tended to view environmental reporting with suspicion as advocacy reporting. Today, having one or more dedicated environmental reporters on staff is still seen as a luxury, rather than necessity, he adds.&ldquo;Having one person cover the beat is like having one person cover all sports or the state capitol,&rdquo; Bowman says. &ldquo;Now that I&rsquo;m working at Cal EPA, and scientists are freely talking to me, I see so many stories. But there are fewer reporters I can turn to who would do the story justice.&ldquo;With climate change becoming a part of mainstream news and education, editors can no longer ignore environmental reporting. The demand is there, but the industry hasn&rsquo;t figured out how to make money off it.&rdquo;Miles O&rsquo;Brien, CNN&rsquo;s environment and technology correspondent until the cable network disbanded its science, technology and environment unit in December 2008, is creating an income stream with nonprofit Spaceflightnow.com, an online venture that provides space coverage.O&rsquo;Brien approached Spaceflightnow.com and suggested continuous video coverage of STS-119, the space shuttle that launched March 15. He found sponsors for the initiative and served as anchor/host for the Webcast, which has covered three other shuttle launches since.&ldquo;We had 190,000 unique visitors for the last launch (STS-128),&rdquo; O&rsquo;Brien says. &ldquo;It was really gratifying. We&rsquo;re in a new era of hyperspecialization with a lot of little audiences. Tweet a little bit, put it on Facebook, and the world will beat a path to your door.&rdquo;O&rsquo;Brien, who worked for CNN for nearly 17 years, continues to work on documentaries for PBS and a blog. He says interest in environmental stories on air is difficult to maintain because topics like global change are big, but don&rsquo;t necessarily lend themselves to visual storytelling.&ldquo;Mainstream media has walked away from the subject matter, but there are opportunities to tell the story in other mediums,&rdquo; he says.The Internet has welcomed many environmental reporters, such as Jane Kay, a longtime environmental writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who lost her job July 31 as part of a large reduction in force at the paper.&ldquo;I&rsquo;m writing for Environmental Health News (environmentalhealthnews.org), a sister site to DailyClimate.org, based on the Pro Publica model,&rdquo; Kay says. &ldquo;EHN started in 2002 as an aggregator of stories, and in the last year it&rsquo;s started commissioning original journalism. So as print reporters leave their papers, they&rsquo;re ending up at places like this. It&rsquo;s going to be up to the reader to figure out where to go now for their news.&rdquo;Kay says environmental journalists, who are knowledgeable about state and federal environmental laws and ecological issues, are concerned about diminishing public access to objective information.&ldquo;This is a time when our planet is facing great environmental problems, and we need sophisticated examinations of how we&rsquo;re going to address these problems,&rdquo; Kay says. &ldquo;We don&rsquo;t want to lose this knowledge that&rsquo;s taken so long to build.&rdquo;While downsizing has pushed veterans like Camille Feanny, former CNN global environmental producer, to leave the business to pursue other passions &mdash; she is pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Florida, and plans to work on global orphan issues &mdash; some have kept one foot in traditional journalism while blazing trails with new methods of environmental reporting.Paul Rogers, resources and environment writer at the San Jose Mercury News, combines a 30-hour, part-time job at the newspaper, with a 20-hour part-time job as managing editor of public broadcast station KQED-TV&rsquo;s Quest, a multimedia series that explores Northern California science, environment and nature through podcasting, radio and educational materials for teachers.Four years ago, Rogers asked the Mercury News to cut his hours so that he could take on the new initiative with KQED, an arrangement that has worked well for all involved. Rogers notes that the newspaper gets the benefit of embedding Quest videos shot in hi-def into his stories on the newspaper Web site, and KQED gets more eyeballs on their work.It&rsquo;s likely that we&rsquo;ll see more newspapers go bankrupt, or cease publishing on dead trees,&rdquo; Rogers says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been intrigued with public broadcasting alternatives because at KQED we&rsquo;re able to cover stories with a different revenue model. Maybe some of the future models for environmental coverage will be these nonprofit models. If this is how we keep environmental reporting alive, so be it.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>The Masters of Environmental Journalism</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/the_masters_of_environmental_j.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38271</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:20:26Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:36:24Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[The environment can be a tough beat. It requires extraordinary persistence and dedication to remain abreast of the myriad developments in an ever-evolving, often controversial field. For some reporters, it has become more than a career &mdash; it is a commitment. Here, NewsPro correspondent Hillary Atkin profiles some of environmental journalism&rsquo;s most accomplished professionals.Seth BorensteinIt was in 1992, and Hurricane Andrew had left a huge swath of devastation across South Florida. Seth Borenstein, then a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel covering a severe regional drought, reported extensively on the disaster and later co-authored a book about it. It was just a sample of things to come in his career.Borenstein is now the national science writer for the Associated Press, and for the past 3&frac12; years has spent his time covering international and national science-related topics including climate change, NASA, astronomy, Earth sciences, archaeology and science ethics. He also investigates stories coming out of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies.&ldquo;I&rsquo;m pretty much doing the science, not the policy, which a colleague does,&rdquo; Borenstein said. &ldquo;I get to write about the latest research, like sea-level rise, and try to bring everything together for the biggest picture look, and what it means closer to home.&rdquo;&ldquo;The next big issue is how does civilization adapt to what is happening with climate change, how do you build smarter?&rdquo; Borenstein said. &ldquo;Do you do geo-engineering with man-made pollution to make it cooler, or put mirrors in space to tinker with our climate? There are all sorts of ethical debates about it.&rdquo;Marla ConeHow do you top an 18-year career at the Los Angeles Times? If you are Marla Cone, who was the senior environmental reporter there until 2008, you become the editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Sciences, a Virginia-based organization that acts as a wire service for environmental news. It distributes its own content, as well as aggregating other environmental news.&ldquo;Our mandate is to give our readers high quality coverage of issues that are getting very little coverage in the rest of the media. Especially with what&rsquo;s happening to mainstream media, people are not getting much environmental journalism,&rdquo; Cone said. &ldquo;We provide classic journalism, foundation-funded, so there are no worries about advertising.&rdquo;While at the L.A. Times, which she left voluntarily even as many of her colleagues lost their jobs, she covered major stories including the harm pollutants do to people&rsquo;s health and the damage pollution does to ecosystems around the world. She also looked at how most industries are highly dependent on hazardous substances, how fireworks create potentially dangerous air pollution, and how lead exposure in children may lead to violent crime.In 2005, Cone authored a book called &ldquo;Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic,&rdquo; after winning a Pew Foundation grant in marine conservation &mdash; which is usually reserved for scientists &mdash; to investigate environmental issues there, particularly how contaminants are affecting wildlife and people in the region.In 1999, she received the first teaching fellowship in environmental journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and taught at the Graduate School of Journalism there.Andrew RevkinGrowing up in Rhode Island, Andrew Revkin fell in love with nature and enjoyed reading books about it. His undergraduate degree was in biology with an emphasis on marine biology. Now an author and an environmental reporter for The New York Times since 1995, Revkin has traveled the world documenting man&rsquo;s relationship to nature.&ldquo;After heading abroad on a fellowship to study isolated island communities, I got the photography and writing bug,&rdquo; said Revkin. &ldquo;In journalism, the two passions &mdash; storytelling and my interest in biology, nature, and the human relationship with nature &mdash; were able to mesh.&rdquo;He writes about global environmental change and the work has taken him from the Amazon to the North Pole to Alaska&rsquo;s North Slope, where a photograph of a blizzard he shot in 2005 won a top award.Revkin also runs the new Dot Earth blog (nytimes.com.earth). He said it revolves around a single question: How do we blend humankind&rsquo;s infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet?&ldquo;There&rsquo;s been a huge increase in volume and in the range of media dealing with environment, blogs particularly,&rdquo; Revkin said. &ldquo;There is still mainly a focus on &lsquo;news you can use&rsquo; and often I wonder if the core issues &mdash; population, poverty, avoidable threats in poor countries, the lack of investment still in energy frontiers &mdash; are getting adequate attention.&rdquo;Ken WeissOn the heels of his Pulitzer Prize-winning series &ldquo;Altered Oceans&rdquo; in the Los Angeles Times, staff writer Ken Weiss is about to embark on world travels covering another major environmental story, which at press time he was not able to reveal.With resources that may make other journalists &ldquo;green&rdquo; with envy, Weiss spent 18 months on the 2006 five-part series chronicling the state of the world&rsquo;s oceans, including the problems of overfishing, and how pollution is changing the chemistry of oceanic ecosystems &mdash; collaborating with another reporter and a photographer/videographer.He&rsquo;ll have a similar setup for his next project.&ldquo;Instead of covering the big cataclysmic events like tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes, what I&rsquo;ve been focusing on is the slow creep of environmental decay,&rdquo; said Weiss. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to cover that slow process, but in the end, the collective toll on the oceans, wildlife and habitat is usually more significant than acute problems resulting from an oil spill or tsunami. The slow creep of change is usually for the worse.&rdquo;Weiss has been covering the environment for 30 years, and says things have shifted from an outlook of man versus nature to one of protecting the Earth and what it provides to man: clean water, fresh air, fertile ground to grow food and timber to build houses.Bob WoodruffTalk about a full plate: In addition to his work as a correspondent for ABC News, Bob Woodruff is now in his second season of hosting Planet Green&rsquo;s half-hour &ldquo;Focus Earth.&rdquo;It&rsquo;s an in-depth series covering subjects such as climate impact, environmental policy, political debate and world events, and it&rsquo;s taken Woodruff &mdash; a veteran international anchor/reporter who recovered from a near-fatal roadside bombing in Iraq &mdash; around the country and the globe.&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a big wake-up call about what&rsquo;s happening with climate change &mdash; and what we can do about it,&rdquo; said Woodruff. &ldquo;Journalistically, it&rsquo;s the next major story.&rdquo;He&rsquo;s done reports on the battle over coal mining in West Virginia, how changes in Florida&rsquo;s Everglades are affecting wildlife, a unique recycling program in Boston and new solutions for waste storage in Iceland.&ldquo;This program is really interesting for me. I&rsquo;ve not been a scientist; it&rsquo;s like a college graduate class on things I&rsquo;d never even known about,&rdquo; Woodruff said. &ldquo;I have hope that we as a country will need more scientists and engineers to come up with solutions. We need to compete as a country to develop new ways to deal with environmental issues. It would increase jobs in this economy. It&rsquo;s not just about science, politics or TV reporting &mdash; this is really huge. &ldquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[The environment can be a tough beat. It requires extraordinary persistence and dedication to remain abreast of the myriad developments in an ever-evolving, often controversial field. For some reporters, it has become more than a career &mdash; it is a commitment. Here, NewsPro correspondent Hillary Atkin profiles some of environmental journalism&rsquo;s most accomplished professionals.Seth BorensteinIt was in 1992, and Hurricane Andrew had left a huge swath of devastation across South Florida. Seth Borenstein, then a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel covering a severe regional drought, reported extensively on the disaster and later co-authored a book about it. It was just a sample of things to come in his career.Borenstein is now the national science writer for the Associated Press, and for the past 3&frac12; years has spent his time covering international and national science-related topics including climate change, NASA, astronomy, Earth sciences, archaeology and science ethics. He also investigates stories coming out of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies.&ldquo;I&rsquo;m pretty much doing the science, not the policy, which a colleague does,&rdquo; Borenstein said. &ldquo;I get to write about the latest research, like sea-level rise, and try to bring everything together for the biggest picture look, and what it means closer to home.&rdquo;&ldquo;The next big issue is how does civilization adapt to what is happening with climate change, how do you build smarter?&rdquo; Borenstein said. &ldquo;Do you do geo-engineering with man-made pollution to make it cooler, or put mirrors in space to tinker with our climate? There are all sorts of ethical debates about it.&rdquo;Marla ConeHow do you top an 18-year career at the Los Angeles Times? If you are Marla Cone, who was the senior environmental reporter there until 2008, you become the editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Sciences, a Virginia-based organization that acts as a wire service for environmental news. It distributes its own content, as well as aggregating other environmental news.&ldquo;Our mandate is to give our readers high quality coverage of issues that are getting very little coverage in the rest of the media. Especially with what&rsquo;s happening to mainstream media, people are not getting much environmental journalism,&rdquo; Cone said. &ldquo;We provide classic journalism, foundation-funded, so there are no worries about advertising.&rdquo;While at the L.A. Times, which she left voluntarily even as many of her colleagues lost their jobs, she covered major stories including the harm pollutants do to people&rsquo;s health and the damage pollution does to ecosystems around the world. She also looked at how most industries are highly dependent on hazardous substances, how fireworks create potentially dangerous air pollution, and how lead exposure in children may lead to violent crime.In 2005, Cone authored a book called &ldquo;Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic,&rdquo; after winning a Pew Foundation grant in marine conservation &mdash; which is usually reserved for scientists &mdash; to investigate environmental issues there, particularly how contaminants are affecting wildlife and people in the region.In 1999, she received the first teaching fellowship in environmental journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and taught at the Graduate School of Journalism there.Andrew RevkinGrowing up in Rhode Island, Andrew Revkin fell in love with nature and enjoyed reading books about it. His undergraduate degree was in biology with an emphasis on marine biology. Now an author and an environmental reporter for The New York Times since 1995, Revkin has traveled the world documenting man&rsquo;s relationship to nature.&ldquo;After heading abroad on a fellowship to study isolated island communities, I got the photography and writing bug,&rdquo; said Revkin. &ldquo;In journalism, the two passions &mdash; storytelling and my interest in biology, nature, and the human relationship with nature &mdash; were able to mesh.&rdquo;He writes about global environmental change and the work has taken him from the Amazon to the North Pole to Alaska&rsquo;s North Slope, where a photograph of a blizzard he shot in 2005 won a top award.Revkin also runs the new Dot Earth blog (nytimes.com.earth). He said it revolves around a single question: How do we blend humankind&rsquo;s infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet?&ldquo;There&rsquo;s been a huge increase in volume and in the range of media dealing with environment, blogs particularly,&rdquo; Revkin said. &ldquo;There is still mainly a focus on &lsquo;news you can use&rsquo; and often I wonder if the core issues &mdash; population, poverty, avoidable threats in poor countries, the lack of investment still in energy frontiers &mdash; are getting adequate attention.&rdquo;Ken WeissOn the heels of his Pulitzer Prize-winning series &ldquo;Altered Oceans&rdquo; in the Los Angeles Times, staff writer Ken Weiss is about to embark on world travels covering another major environmental story, which at press time he was not able to reveal.With resources that may make other journalists &ldquo;green&rdquo; with envy, Weiss spent 18 months on the 2006 five-part series chronicling the state of the world&rsquo;s oceans, including the problems of overfishing, and how pollution is changing the chemistry of oceanic ecosystems &mdash; collaborating with another reporter and a photographer/videographer.He&rsquo;ll have a similar setup for his next project.&ldquo;Instead of covering the big cataclysmic events like tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes, what I&rsquo;ve been focusing on is the slow creep of environmental decay,&rdquo; said Weiss. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s hard to cover that slow process, but in the end, the collective toll on the oceans, wildlife and habitat is usually more significant than acute problems resulting from an oil spill or tsunami. The slow creep of change is usually for the worse.&rdquo;Weiss has been covering the environment for 30 years, and says things have shifted from an outlook of man versus nature to one of protecting the Earth and what it provides to man: clean water, fresh air, fertile ground to grow food and timber to build houses.Bob WoodruffTalk about a full plate: In addition to his work as a correspondent for ABC News, Bob Woodruff is now in his second season of hosting Planet Green&rsquo;s half-hour &ldquo;Focus Earth.&rdquo;It&rsquo;s an in-depth series covering subjects such as climate impact, environmental policy, political debate and world events, and it&rsquo;s taken Woodruff &mdash; a veteran international anchor/reporter who recovered from a near-fatal roadside bombing in Iraq &mdash; around the country and the globe.&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a big wake-up call about what&rsquo;s happening with climate change &mdash; and what we can do about it,&rdquo; said Woodruff. &ldquo;Journalistically, it&rsquo;s the next major story.&rdquo;He&rsquo;s done reports on the battle over coal mining in West Virginia, how changes in Florida&rsquo;s Everglades are affecting wildlife, a unique recycling program in Boston and new solutions for waste storage in Iceland.&ldquo;This program is really interesting for me. I&rsquo;ve not been a scientist; it&rsquo;s like a college graduate class on things I&rsquo;d never even known about,&rdquo; Woodruff said. &ldquo;I have hope that we as a country will need more scientists and engineers to come up with solutions. We need to compete as a country to develop new ways to deal with environmental issues. It would increase jobs in this economy. It&rsquo;s not just about science, politics or TV reporting &mdash; this is really huge. &ldquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>Planet Green: TV Designed for 'Conscious Living'</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/tv_designed_for_conscious_livi.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38270</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:14:12Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:19:52Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Allison J. Waldman At Discovery Communication&rsquo;s Planet Green network, it&rsquo;s all about evolution.&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in the midst of a reformation,&rdquo; said Planet Green President and General Manager Laura Michalchyshyn, who has been leading the channel&rsquo;s development since she came on board five months ago. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a generation now, the millennials, that walk, sleep and eat environmental issues. We need to stay ahead of the curve by being proactive.&rdquo;When Planet Green launched in June 2008 with the mission of the greening of America and the world, the goal was programming that promoted an eco-friendly lifestyle.&ldquo;We&rsquo;re broadening the scope from just saying we&rsquo;re an eco-lifestyle channel,&rdquo; Michalchyshyn said. &ldquo;This is going beyond the use of the word green. It&rsquo;s really about sustainability.&rdquo;There&rsquo;s a lot of new programming in the works at Planet Green, including 10 shows in development.&ldquo;In July we announced a number of series and specials, moving away from the do-it-yourself, how-to genre and moving it into provocative narrative and storytelling,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;There are enough shows on competing networks that cover how-to. We want to be more about inspiring and more aspirational.&rdquo;She also said the goal is to make Planet Green programming &ldquo;accessible, mainstream, action-oriented, measurable and exciting.&rdquo;Michalchyshyn said, &ldquo;Those words, I think, weren&rsquo;t completely embraced when we first launched. This is now conscious-living TV, being aware of how we&rsquo;re making decisions and how our decisions have an impact on the planet and our future.&ldquo;The strategy is a shifting-gears strategy. We have shows that include everything from &lsquo;Planet Mechanics&rsquo; to &lsquo;Cool Fuel&rsquo; that are oriented toward cars, &lsquo;Gadget Geeks&rsquo; and shows for people who are interested how new technologies are changing the way we think of transportation and the vehicles we drive,&rdquo; she said.Planet Green&rsquo;s brand definition has changed along with its programming.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve been calling ourselves a 24/7 eco-lifestyle channel, but now we&rsquo;re saying that this channel is about people and our impact on this planet and how we interact with the planet,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about people making a positive change. Green is a fact, but sustainability is forever. We&rsquo;re moving our definition to the sustainability camp and looking at people and characters and a great narrative in terms of the kind of programming on our air.&rdquo;In reforming Planet Green Michalchyshyn has been learning who the typical viewer is. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re learning that this is an engaged audience. Our audiences are interested and curious; they tend to be a little bit more sophisticated. These are avid learners,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re skewing slightly more female than male. Our demographic age is 42.&rdquo;The Planet Green viewer is also active across multiple platforms, especially PlanetGreen.com and Treehugger.com.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve seen a growth year on year that&rsquo;s quite extraordinary. Our growth in our Web traffic is one of the ways that we&rsquo;re [able to tell] the activity for the linear net is increasing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Our audience tends to be on all platforms at all times.&ldquo;Another huge focus for us is making sure our social media strategy, our Web strategy, is about delivering content that is unique and customized for the digital age.&rdquo;One goal that Planet Green has espoused over the past few months is becoming an entertaining, multiplatform deliverer of that kind of content.&ldquo;The network has got to be entertaining to our audience. The channel is only a success if it&rsquo;s entertaining,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re bringing in a whole new slate of programming, introducing new series and specials and a documentary block.&rdquo;The documentary block is a weekly premiere of classic and high-profile films such as &ldquo;An Inconvenient Truth&rdquo; and &ldquo;Who Killed the Electric Car?&rdquo;&ldquo;Every Saturday night we present a feature-length or a one-hour documentary that is exclusive to Planet Green. The majority will be premieres to U.S. television,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We started with &lsquo;The Last Beekeeper,&rsquo; which Jeremy Simmons directed and World of Wonder produced. It traveled the film festival circuit, but never had a broadcast premiere.&rdquo;More than any other show on Planet Green, the series &ldquo;Living With Ed&rdquo; captures the balance of entertainment and information that Michalchyshyn talks about. It&rsquo;s the network&rsquo;s signature show.&ldquo;Ed Begley Jr. is the real deal. This is a guy who rides his bike all around L.A. He&rsquo;s one of the earliest Prius owners, and he&rsquo;s a character,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s been an environmentalist and a community activist for over 20 years, and we&rsquo;re evolving that show. We&rsquo;re going to see Ed and his wife, Rachelle, beyond the home and the do-it-yourself. We&rsquo;re going to look at Ed&rsquo;s involvement in the community and the kind of activities he&rsquo;s doing on the road. So we want to broaden the scope of the show.&rdquo;Like Begley, chef Emeril LaGasse is a Planet Green star. &ldquo;Emeril has such a way with engaging audiences, and he&rsquo;s got such a personality. He&rsquo;s done three different kinds of specials for us,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;He just finished shooting a special in Napa Valley, which will air at the end of October, and he&rsquo;s looking at organic wines, late fall harvest, foods that are sourced in Northern California. We&rsquo;re all about getting Emeril out of the kitchen and interacting with the farmers, the makers of cheese, the vintners. It&rsquo;s about more than cooking.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Allison J. Waldman At Discovery Communication&rsquo;s Planet Green network, it&rsquo;s all about evolution.&ldquo;We&rsquo;re in the midst of a reformation,&rdquo; said Planet Green President and General Manager Laura Michalchyshyn, who has been leading the channel&rsquo;s development since she came on board five months ago. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a generation now, the millennials, that walk, sleep and eat environmental issues. We need to stay ahead of the curve by being proactive.&rdquo;When Planet Green launched in June 2008 with the mission of the greening of America and the world, the goal was programming that promoted an eco-friendly lifestyle.&ldquo;We&rsquo;re broadening the scope from just saying we&rsquo;re an eco-lifestyle channel,&rdquo; Michalchyshyn said. &ldquo;This is going beyond the use of the word green. It&rsquo;s really about sustainability.&rdquo;There&rsquo;s a lot of new programming in the works at Planet Green, including 10 shows in development.&ldquo;In July we announced a number of series and specials, moving away from the do-it-yourself, how-to genre and moving it into provocative narrative and storytelling,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;There are enough shows on competing networks that cover how-to. We want to be more about inspiring and more aspirational.&rdquo;She also said the goal is to make Planet Green programming &ldquo;accessible, mainstream, action-oriented, measurable and exciting.&rdquo;Michalchyshyn said, &ldquo;Those words, I think, weren&rsquo;t completely embraced when we first launched. This is now conscious-living TV, being aware of how we&rsquo;re making decisions and how our decisions have an impact on the planet and our future.&ldquo;The strategy is a shifting-gears strategy. We have shows that include everything from &lsquo;Planet Mechanics&rsquo; to &lsquo;Cool Fuel&rsquo; that are oriented toward cars, &lsquo;Gadget Geeks&rsquo; and shows for people who are interested how new technologies are changing the way we think of transportation and the vehicles we drive,&rdquo; she said.Planet Green&rsquo;s brand definition has changed along with its programming.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve been calling ourselves a 24/7 eco-lifestyle channel, but now we&rsquo;re saying that this channel is about people and our impact on this planet and how we interact with the planet,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about people making a positive change. Green is a fact, but sustainability is forever. We&rsquo;re moving our definition to the sustainability camp and looking at people and characters and a great narrative in terms of the kind of programming on our air.&rdquo;In reforming Planet Green Michalchyshyn has been learning who the typical viewer is. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re learning that this is an engaged audience. Our audiences are interested and curious; they tend to be a little bit more sophisticated. These are avid learners,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re skewing slightly more female than male. Our demographic age is 42.&rdquo;The Planet Green viewer is also active across multiple platforms, especially PlanetGreen.com and Treehugger.com.&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve seen a growth year on year that&rsquo;s quite extraordinary. Our growth in our Web traffic is one of the ways that we&rsquo;re [able to tell] the activity for the linear net is increasing,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Our audience tends to be on all platforms at all times.&ldquo;Another huge focus for us is making sure our social media strategy, our Web strategy, is about delivering content that is unique and customized for the digital age.&rdquo;One goal that Planet Green has espoused over the past few months is becoming an entertaining, multiplatform deliverer of that kind of content.&ldquo;The network has got to be entertaining to our audience. The channel is only a success if it&rsquo;s entertaining,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re bringing in a whole new slate of programming, introducing new series and specials and a documentary block.&rdquo;The documentary block is a weekly premiere of classic and high-profile films such as &ldquo;An Inconvenient Truth&rdquo; and &ldquo;Who Killed the Electric Car?&rdquo;&ldquo;Every Saturday night we present a feature-length or a one-hour documentary that is exclusive to Planet Green. The majority will be premieres to U.S. television,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We started with &lsquo;The Last Beekeeper,&rsquo; which Jeremy Simmons directed and World of Wonder produced. It traveled the film festival circuit, but never had a broadcast premiere.&rdquo;More than any other show on Planet Green, the series &ldquo;Living With Ed&rdquo; captures the balance of entertainment and information that Michalchyshyn talks about. It&rsquo;s the network&rsquo;s signature show.&ldquo;Ed Begley Jr. is the real deal. This is a guy who rides his bike all around L.A. He&rsquo;s one of the earliest Prius owners, and he&rsquo;s a character,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s been an environmentalist and a community activist for over 20 years, and we&rsquo;re evolving that show. We&rsquo;re going to see Ed and his wife, Rachelle, beyond the home and the do-it-yourself. We&rsquo;re going to look at Ed&rsquo;s involvement in the community and the kind of activities he&rsquo;s doing on the road. So we want to broaden the scope of the show.&rdquo;Like Begley, chef Emeril LaGasse is a Planet Green star. &ldquo;Emeril has such a way with engaging audiences, and he&rsquo;s got such a personality. He&rsquo;s done three different kinds of specials for us,&rdquo; said Michalchyshyn. &ldquo;He just finished shooting a special in Napa Valley, which will air at the end of October, and he&rsquo;s looking at organic wines, late fall harvest, foods that are sourced in Northern California. We&rsquo;re all about getting Emeril out of the kitchen and interacting with the farmers, the makers of cheese, the vintners. It&rsquo;s about more than cooking.&rdquo;]]>
   </content>
</entry>

<entry>
   <title>NBCU Enlists All TV Units in Eco Agenda</title>
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/10/nbcu_enlists_all_tv_units_in_e.php" />
   <id>tag:www.tvweek.com,2009:/news//1.38268</id>
   
   <published>2009-10-02T17:08:38Z</published>
   <updated>2009-10-02T17:10:53Z</updated>
   
   <summary><![CDATA[By Allison J. Waldman In 2008, Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, undertook the leadership role in an environmental awareness initiative for NBC Universal called Green Is Universal. A year later, the commitment to green remains an integral part of the NBC Universal brand and corporate identity.&ldquo;I think the Green Is Universal initiative has really taken off both externally in how we&rsquo;re interfacing with our consumers, and internally as far as how we as a company are really embracing green and driving it through our own operation,&rdquo; said Beth Colleton, vice president of Green Is Universal.When the program began one of the goals was the creation of a handbook about how to enact green production. Today the handbook exists and is actively in use. &ldquo;Referencing the manual, what we did worked really well,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;We did some pilot work on film and TV shows to really learn how to create green production and worked that information into a play-by-play instruction manual &ndash; one for film and one for TV &ndash; that is now integrated into the business process of our Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Universal Media Studio operations.&rdquo;The green process isn&rsquo;t found only in production, but also all business offices and operations.&nbsp;&quot;Green is sometimes very visual, you know you can see it right there with recycling, but sometimes green is the absence of activity. You might be in an office or in a TV studio and not realize that some green changes have been put in place,&rdquo; said Colleton.For instance, a green message might be found in a copy room. &ldquo;We can communicate behavioral changes to our crews and employees, so there&rsquo;ll be a message that if they print less, what the effect will be on the environment. The physical branding approach not only communicates information about best practices that are taking place, but informs our work force about the ways they can participate in change,&rdquo; she said.One new project NBCU is enacting is called &ldquo;The Green Apprentice.&rdquo; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve put additional dollars aside to spur innovation and really encourage our work force to look for cutting-edge innovative ways to implement energy waste and water savings throughout our operations. The proposals are out right now and they&rsquo;re starting to come in,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;Internally, we have just seen so much traction with green. People are looking for creative ways to implement green and are looking for more long-term solutions.&rdquo;Despite the recession NBCU hasn&rsquo;t abandoned this effort, and the public has come to identify NBC as the green network. &ldquo;We have some research that we did a few months ago that shows that. Consumers and the general public see the value of green not just in their belief system but in the way that they actually spend their dollars,&rdquo; said Colleton.The Green Is Universal message will be underscored during sweeps. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the same as last year. From November 15 to 22, all of the brands of NBC Universal will go green, so to speak, and be dedicated to delivering green information in entertainment and content those seven days,&rdquo; said Colleton.Whether on Bravo or USA or NBC, many of the performers have shown great support for Green is Universal. &ldquo;We are really lucky because our talent is so engaged in the cause of the environment that they often come to us looking for ways to get involved,&rdquo; she said.For the on-air, award-winning &ldquo;The More You Know&rdquo; PSA program, 23 different stars volunteered to participate in last year&rsquo;s campaign. &ldquo;We eventually had to tell folks beyond the 23 that we couldn&rsquo;t take anymore. They&rsquo;ve also participated in volunteer events and other public service initiatives to really drive the public to engage here,&rdquo; said Colleton.&ldquo;One of the key differences is that green isn&rsquo;t just a cause anymore, it&rsquo;s really a lifestyle that people are recognizing locally, so it&rsquo;s not a distant 100 years in the future what&rsquo;s the state of the environment going to be,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;People are seeing the effects of the environment in their everyday lives, so they are very much engaged in trying to change their own behavior for the betterment of themselves, their families and their communities, and most importantly their children.&rdquo;For NBCU, the initiative has proven to be a success. &ldquo;Just this spring, the Audubon Society gave us the Rachel Carson Award,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;Since we&rsquo;re not a manufacturing company or a building or textile company, they were appreciative of what we have in our arsenal to make a difference. We can communicate with 100 million people during a month and arm them with the right information so that they can make those changes in their daily lives. We do that in our entertainment shows, news properties and we deliver this information all year long.&rdquo;]]></summary>
   <author>
      <name>Tom Gilbert</name>
      <uri>http://www.tvweek.com/</uri>
   </author>
   
      <category term="Broadcast" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Cable" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Digital" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
      <category term="Syndication" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#category" />
   
   
   <content type="html" xml:lang="en" xml:base="http://www.tvweek.com/news/">
      <![CDATA[By Allison J. Waldman In 2008, Lauren Zalaznick, president of NBC Universal Women and Lifestyle Entertainment Networks, undertook the leadership role in an environmental awareness initiative for NBC Universal called Green Is Universal. A year later, the commitment to green remains an integral part of the NBC Universal brand and corporate identity.&ldquo;I think the Green Is Universal initiative has really taken off both externally in how we&rsquo;re interfacing with our consumers, and internally as far as how we as a company are really embracing green and driving it through our own operation,&rdquo; said Beth Colleton, vice president of Green Is Universal.When the program began one of the goals was the creation of a handbook about how to enact green production. Today the handbook exists and is actively in use. &ldquo;Referencing the manual, what we did worked really well,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;We did some pilot work on film and TV shows to really learn how to create green production and worked that information into a play-by-play instruction manual &ndash; one for film and one for TV &ndash; that is now integrated into the business process of our Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Universal Media Studio operations.&rdquo;The green process isn&rsquo;t found only in production, but also all business offices and operations.&nbsp;&quot;Green is sometimes very visual, you know you can see it right there with recycling, but sometimes green is the absence of activity. You might be in an office or in a TV studio and not realize that some green changes have been put in place,&rdquo; said Colleton.For instance, a green message might be found in a copy room. &ldquo;We can communicate behavioral changes to our crews and employees, so there&rsquo;ll be a message that if they print less, what the effect will be on the environment. The physical branding approach not only communicates information about best practices that are taking place, but informs our work force about the ways they can participate in change,&rdquo; she said.One new project NBCU is enacting is called &ldquo;The Green Apprentice.&rdquo; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve put additional dollars aside to spur innovation and really encourage our work force to look for cutting-edge innovative ways to implement energy waste and water savings throughout our operations. The proposals are out right now and they&rsquo;re starting to come in,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;Internally, we have just seen so much traction with green. People are looking for creative ways to implement green and are looking for more long-term solutions.&rdquo;Despite the recession NBCU hasn&rsquo;t abandoned this effort, and the public has come to identify NBC as the green network. &ldquo;We have some research that we did a few months ago that shows that. Consumers and the general public see the value of green not just in their belief system but in the way that they actually spend their dollars,&rdquo; said Colleton.The Green Is Universal message will be underscored during sweeps. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the same as last year. From November 15 to 22, all of the brands of NBC Universal will go green, so to speak, and be dedicated to delivering green information in entertainment and content those seven days,&rdquo; said Colleton.Whether on Bravo or USA or NBC, many of the performers have shown great support for Green is Universal. &ldquo;We are really lucky because our talent is so engaged in the cause of the environment that they often come to us looking for ways to get involved,&rdquo; she said.For the on-air, award-winning &ldquo;The More You Know&rdquo; PSA program, 23 different stars volunteered to participate in last year&rsquo;s campaign. &ldquo;We eventually had to tell folks beyond the 23 that we couldn&rsquo;t take anymore. They&rsquo;ve also participated in volunteer events and other public service initiatives to really drive the public to engage here,&rdquo; said Colleton.&ldquo;One of the key differences is that green isn&rsquo;t just a cause anymore, it&rsquo;s really a lifestyle that people are recognizing locally, so it&rsquo;s not a distant 100 years in the future what&rsquo;s the state of the environment going to be,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;People are seeing the effects of the environment in their everyday lives, so they are very much engaged in trying to change their own behavior for the betterment of themselves, their families and their communities, and most importantly their children.&rdquo;For NBCU, the initiative has proven to be a success. &ldquo;Just this spring, the Audubon Society gave us the Rachel Carson Award,&rdquo; said Colleton. &ldquo;Since we&rsquo;re not a manufacturing company or a building or textile company, they were appreciative of what we have in our arsenal to make a difference. We can communicate with 100 million people during a month and arm them with the right information so that they can make those changes in their daily lives. We do that in our entertainment shows, news properties and we deliver this information all year long.&rdquo;]]>
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