A Mission for Environmental Communication Ethics

While I struggle with Dreamweaver, Wordpress, Blogger and a bunch of other platforms you can check my posts at Indications. My first one talks about the underlying ethics of environmental communication.

COCE, 10th Edition

Travis Wagner, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine, announces that the 10th Biennial Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE) will be held June 27-30, 2009, at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

In this edition, COCE will showcase approximately 80 presentations on public participation, media criticism, social construction, risk assessment, and policy applications.

Phoenix Sun Posts List of Environmental News Sites

Journalist Osha Gray Davidson published a list of environment-related news sites on the Phoenix Sun. The list, provides a variety of sites and blogs that are specialized on specific topics from global climate crisis and energy issues to animals rights and community development.

Solving news matters on their own

A group of citizens of Carbondale, Col. decided to run their own newspaper when Swift Communications stopped printing the weekly Valley Journal, as reported by the Rural Blog and the L. A. Times.
Rebecca Young and 6 other residents founded, then, the Sopris Sun to attend the town's need for news.

Global Warming in 15 minutes

The National Geographic series "Six Degrees Could Change the World" (2008) explains what happens if we add one to six degrees Celsius to the Earth's average in 7 short chapters (about 15 minutes total).
The series is based on Mark Lynas's book with the same name, which provides specific scenarios of how life on Earth would be affected by global warming.

Another version was produced for the Green.tv web site:
"Six Degrees Could Change the World" (2008)
Green.TV
Author: Mark Lynas and Steven Holland
Copyright: Mark Lynas and Steven Holland

New blog on environmental journalism

"What has six legs and can hold up thousands of tons of concrete?" It's a lead example that David Poulson, professor at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, gives in his new blog on environmental journalism called "Cover the Planet."
The blog is a welcome addition to help the relatively small group of people who tries to take on the whole world in as few words as possible: environmental journalists.
"It’s daunting enough to understand environmental issues. Throw in the additional task of explaining them to the public and you’ve bought yourself a lot more trouble," Poulson wrote in the about section of Cover the Planet. "Now do it on deadline," he challenged.

"Schneider believes that coverage lacking scientifically-trained reporters and producers lose credibility and insightfulness"

Stanford climate specialist Steve Schneider explains the effects of science and environmental reporters lay off on Mongabay.com. I addressed this issue on my February 6 post.

Does saying bye to newspapers improve news reporting?

The demise of newspapers means better journalism is what Jim Stovall, journalism professor at the University of Tennessee, said in his journalism education website.

Great discussion about Spot.Us.com

Spot.us of the websites I cited here as a new business model for news appeared on James Rainey's column for the L.A. Time.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-onthemedia8-2009feb08,0,5497178.column

This is the response by David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, to Rainey's critique:

http://www.digidave.org/adventures_in_freelancing/2009/02/spotus-gets-first-great-critique-we-are-listening-learning-and-plotting.html

Engaged Environmental Reporting and Advocacy: Two Different Animals

With the whole economic avalanche hitting newspapers and other media outlets, environmental and science reporters seem to be getting the hardest part of the deal.

Personally, I would expect that news media outlets would like to keep journalists that are better prepared to cover possible solutions. However, the crisis also opens a chance for real change to set in: new news media business formats.

In my previous posts I added some examples of what I mean by that. From co-ops to non-profits, some news media entrepreneurs are realizing that you cannot compete against free information on the web with the same old idea of "maximizing profit margins at all costs" kind of mentality.

This brings me back to my topic: engaged journalism. Actually, if you think about it, many media ethicists like Clifford Christians, for an example, have been pushing it with another name: communitarian ethics. Engaged journalism, differently from advocacy, means to understand journalism as a public service.

Understanding journalism as public service also means to understand the work of a journalist as the performance of a social role. Open societies with democratic governments depend on the continuous flow of accurate, relevant, meaningful and useful information to keep governmental institutions and large corporations in consonance with the public interest.

In this way, an engaged journalist is the one who look for information to help the civil society keep control of the state. That can be performed in different levels, but the basic premise is to help communities to improve their quality of life and empower them to participate in the public life. Thus, both the topic and the format of a journalistic story should be oriented to achieve such goal.

More importantly though is the way the reporter write the story. It should provide information that allows the public to take action. The objective is not only to bring awareness, but enlightenment about the readers' options. Differently from advocacy, journalists should not tell the public what to do, but how the readers can act if they choose to do so. The idea is not apart from what most ethical journalists already do, but it should help some overworked and overstressed journalists to pause and think why they are doing what they do; to engage in the very core of the journalistic purpose.

In the case of engaged journalism, we do what we do because people need the information we provide to live better lives. When we fail to do our jobs thoroughly and with competence, we know who we are hurting. It's not an abstract idea of an audience, but a very present and concrete person standing right next to us in our neighborhood.

Writing Green Registration

The registration form for the Writing Green - Environmental Journalism Conference is now up and running at http://etspj.org/environmental-conference/registration/.

Writing Green Poster

The poster for the Writing Green - Environmental Journalism Conference is ready. Check it out!

Writing Green - Environmental Journalism Conference

The East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists (ETSPJ) is sponsoring Writing Green, a cutting-edge environmental journalism conference on Friday, March 27, 2009, in Knoxville, Tenn.

The day-long conference organized by Amanda Womac (Hellbender Press) will address not only the general difficulties journalists face when covering the environmental beat, but also the new challenges and opportunities brought by the development of new media tools.

Together with TNJN.com and the students of my JEM 200 class at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I will conduct a real-time, multiplatform coverage experiment using social media tools (Facebook, Publish2, Twitter etc.), Enviralblog and TNJN.com.

For new updates, comments and more information about Writing Green, please got to the conference website, our Facebook page or look for our updates (#WritingGreen) on Twitter.