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Keeping public aware, interested are keys to environmental journalism, panel says By
Jennifer Brennan
Journalists covering the environment and natural resources face the twin problems of making their editors and their audienes care about significant news, panelists at a regional conference of professional journalists said Saturday. Professionals, aspiring professionals and students in journalism were brought together to participate in discussion and generate ideas on the topic: "The Growing West: What's Happening" at the Utah Professional Chapter Society of Professional Journalists spring conference. The conference was at the Old Main building. At the Saturday afternoon panel, the experts tackled the issue of "How the Pros Do It: Covering Growth Issues" The panel of three experts was moderated by Charles W. Gay, assistant dean of Natural Resources at Utah State University. Todd Hougaard, senior news photographer for Fox 13-KSTU Salt Lake City, is the president of the professional chapters of SPJ and the National Press Photagrapher's Association in Utah. He has won numerous SPJ and UBA awards in addition to three regional Emmys and one national Telly. Hougaard led the panel by asking the audience to list three to five topics that interested them if writing a story. He proceeded with asking if the audience had written any articles in the past two weeks that were interesting to them. "If you want to be a journalist, get stories you want to do," Hougaard said. With audience input, he outlined what a story often needs to be newsworthy. Conflict, prominence, human interest, unusualness, timeliness and proximity to the reader were some of the responses. A lot of times, journalists don't listen, he said. "Listen better and do things you care about," he advised the audience. After Hougaard, Donna Kemp, who covers environmental issues for the Deseret News, spoke about her seven-part series on Utah's toxic past. The project took her three months. Kemp has been a journalist for 15 years and has won national awards for a series about state efforts to repudiate federal control of public lands, "This Land is My Land" and a series on environmental problems facing the Walla Walla River, "A River Runs Through Us." She said, "The biggest challenge is trying to make your editors understand this is a big deal." "Reporting both sides of the issue" is another way to deal with challenging stories, she said. To what extent is she passionate about environmental reporting? "Giving the readers a comprehensive look toward the issue [such as] the readers who did not know there was pollution out there" she said. This is in addition to her general curiosity with the issue, Kemp said. The third panelist, JoAnn Valenti, is a professor of communications at Brigham Young University and received her Ph.D in natural resources at the University of Michigan. She serves on the editorial boards of SEJournal, the Journal of Public Relations Research, the journal of Religion and Media, and the journal Science Communication. For the past six years, she has been working on a census study of all environmental journalists in the nation. Media more often frame sustainable development as economic growth. Media favor government sources in environmental news, Valenti said. "You are the watchdogs of governmental sources," she said to the audience. She recommended Web sites in which environmental journalists can seek information: Society of Environmental Journalists at www.sej.org and National Association of Science Writers at www.NASW.org. "This is Utah. Some of you got some tough stories to tell," Valenti said. Convergence between print and broadcast media was the next topic of discussion. "If we want an informed republic, [the] convergence of TV and print [is a] way to really do our work and reach the audience," Valenti said.
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