Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those s0-called Circum-Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like...
Category: Environment & Energy Stories
Show only environment and energy story posts
Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those s0-called Circum-Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like they used to! They're wandering far south with a load of frigid air and when they wander back up there they haul warmer with thwm, accelerating the summertime melt-off of the ice pack. Gadzooks, we really are getting a whole new planet.
So that led to a search for some snow news. First up is a story that got a good deal of coverage. It also offers a lesson in how somebody else's rewrite might really mess with your reporting.
1) The Adelies of Beaufort Island.
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's...
The Pulitzer Prizes won't be announced until Monday, but Investigative Reporters and Editors and the custodians of Syracuse University's Mirror Awards for reporting on the media industry have announced their winners and finalists. (The Mirror Awards announced finalists only; the winners will be announced at a June 5 ceremony in New York.)
Several science, environment and technology stories are among the winners and finalists.
The Seattle Times was a finalist for an IRE award with a story on "the dark side of elephant captivity," and National Geographic made the finals with a piece called "Blood Ivory," about the ivory...
10Apr 2013
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example,...
Journalism is built upon shortcuts. Not always, and not everywhere. Long stories can be deliberately--and effectively--discursive. But daily news items rely on shortcuts to get the job done in as little time as possible.
Take, for example, an obit today for Robert Edwards, one of the developers of in-vitro fertilization. The obit was written by AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng. It begins, "Robert Edwards, a Nobel prizewinner from Britain...died Wednesday at age 87."
"Nobel prizewinner" is a shortcut. It tells us in two words (I'd make it three) that Edwards likely did good and important research, and that he was probably well known. A couple of grafs later, the story says that Edwards and his late colleague, Patrick Steptoe, were "accused of playing...
Science News's Andrew Grant has the goods on the great NIF, which stands for National Ignition Facility which in turn is, we all know, a gigantic laser complex at the Livermore National...
Science News's Andrew Grant has the goods on the great NIF, which stands for National Ignition Facility which in turn is, we all know, a gigantic laser complex at the Livermore National Laboratory. It cost $3.5 billion dollars or so and so far has done everything (the lasers are stupendously competent) except live up to its name. Grant's cover story does not dance around the abject failure of this monster squeeze box to roundly crush hydrogen isotope- filled targets down so hot and tiny they transmute to helium and a whole lot of energy. Instead of making small spheres of instant star stuff, the lasers huff and puff perfectly as engineered but the targets smoosh and squiggle and evade the mighty machine's blow sufficiently to dance far, perhaps irredeemably far clear of fusion.
This has the whiff of scandal. Not the...
On Sunday, March 31, The New York Times published a dramatic indictment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Written by Ian Urbina...
On Sunday, March 31, The New York Times published a dramatic indictment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Written by Ian Urbina, the story revealed OSHA to be essentially powerless in dealing with working conditions that threaten workers' health and lives. Much of the story dealt with Royale Comfort Seating in North Carolina, and its unwillingness to stop using a dangerous chemical known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB.
Dean Starkman, who runs The Audit, the business-news section of the Columbia Journalism Review, found the series "magisterial" and "a great example of agenda-setting public-interest reporting of a kind that, sad to say, is becoming increasingly scarce among mainstream business news outlets...
[Updates with addition of some authors' names, links, and mention of article in Outside magazine.]
National Geographic led the list of National...
[Updates with addition of some authors' names, links, and mention of article in Outside magazine.]
National Geographic led the list of National Magazine Award finalists with seven nominations, the American Society of Magazine Editors announced today. Wired received three nominations and Scientific American was awarded two.
That put science journalism in a leading position among the 62 finalists in 23 categories. (The language is a bit confusing. "Finalists" are the nominees among which a winner will be chosen in each category at a dinner in New York on May 2.)
National Geographic received its honors in the categories of general excellence in print and digital media, and...
[Disclosure: I am on the board of the Science Friday Initiative, which produces Science Friday, and I am a guest on the program from time to time.]
NPR announced this morning on its blog that...
[Disclosure: I am on the board of the Science Friday Initiative, which produces Science Friday, and I am a guest on the program from time to time.]
NPR announced this morning on its blog that it is canceling its 21-year-old afternoon news program Talk of the Nation, effective July 1. But host Ira Flatow and Science Friday, which fills a Talk of the Nation time slot, will continue to broadcast at the usual time--from 2-4pm Eastern time on Fridays, according to a statement.
"We see this is a terrific opportunity for us," said Danielle M. Dana, executive director of the Science Friday Initiative, in an email to the organization's board members. "We’ve spent 22 years making excellent, award-...
29Mar 2013
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece Wednesday in The New York Daily News in which he urged New York Gov...
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece Wednesday in The New York Daily News in which he urged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to embrace fracking and encourage greater production of natural gas.
That was followed yesterday by this noisy headline at ProPublica: "More Than a Matter of Opinion: Ed Rendell’s Plea for Fracking Fails to Disclose Industry Ties." Under that headline, Justin Elliott wrote that Rendell has worked "as a paid consultant to a private equity firm with investments in the natural gas industry."
I have no argument about the disclosure of this relationship. Rendell should have told...
People who drill deep holes in the ground and shove or pull fluids through them have been causing earthquakes for at least 80 years. But few if any have been as big as the magnitue 5.6 quake that busted chimneys and scattered goods across the floors of stores in Oklahoma on Nov. 6, 2011. From the start...
People who drill deep holes in the ground and shove or pull fluids through them have been causing earthquakes for at least 80 years. But few if any have been as big as the magnitue 5.6 quake that busted chimneys and scattered goods across the floors of stores in Oklahoma on Nov. 6, 2011. From the start suspicion was raised by the epicenter's location - right where an oil company has been injecting wastewater deep into the underlying rock.
This is not fracking for either natural gas or oil, by the way. It also is not a carbon capture and sequestration test to see if CO2 can be pumped way down yonder where it is unlikely it will leak up, at least not much. But the basic geophysics are similar enough that the new paper's conclusion will surely reverberate in public hearings whenever a new fracking field or CCS program is before regulators and watchful activists. The paper is in Geology, its authors are at the University of Oklahoma, Columbia U, and...
Arctic Sea Ice hit the news two ways this week. One was simple enough - the winter refreeze of the Arctic moved fast, as expected. After all last year's summer melt-off was the largest ever, so the remnant ice pack had a long way to go to rebuild itself, if only thinly, during the dark winter. At its...
Arctic Sea Ice hit the news two ways this week. One was simple enough - the winter refreeze of the Arctic moved fast, as expected. After all last year's summer melt-off was the largest ever, so the remnant ice pack had a long way to go to rebuild itself, if only thinly, during the dark winter. At its peak, which we just past, it was the 6th lowest in the instrumented record. The second is not so simple. A slew of news outlets wrote up the causative link between loss of Arctic ice and the outbreak of bitter winter and spring weather - cold and snowy - in parts of the world at more temperate latitudes including the US and Europe. One might instinctively think that a less-cold Arctic would also mean less cold and snow to the south as well.
I've read a lot of the stories on this second topic and none do a particularly good job leading readers to see a natural way for a warming world to include a rapidly warming Arctic that in turn would make the rest...
This morning, running through energy news stories at a popular aggregator site (Zite Magazine) this dramatic headline greeted the eye: Coal power likely culprit behind thousands of deaths in Alberta: Study. Thousands! That's a lot. Click on it, one goes straight to the media source:
- ...
This morning, running through energy news stories at a popular aggregator site (Zite Magazine) this dramatic headline greeted the eye: Coal power likely culprit behind thousands of deaths in Alberta: Study. Thousands! That's a lot. Click on it, one goes straight to the media source:
- Globe and Mail - Josh Wingrove: Use of coal power costs $300-million a year in health expenses: report ; The meat of the report, reports Wingrove: "Coal pollution also leads to 100 premature deaths, 700 emergency room visits and 80 hospital admissions each years, as well as trigggering asthma attacks. It also emits other contaminants, such as mercury, said the study."
The derived hed in the version that first caught the tracker's attention, with its thousands of deaths, may be...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has...
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post is reporting that Lenny Bernstein, a sports editor at The Washington Post, has been assigned to the environment beat at the paper.
The Columbia Journalism Review and others raised concern earlier this month when Bernstein's predecessor on the beat, Juliet Eilperin, was reassigned to the White House. The move was particularly disturbing because it came just after The New York Times had canceled its Green blog, a signal to many that the Times would devote fewer resources to environmental coverage. (Times officials said that was not the case, and that...
21Mar 2013
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made...
Yesterday, I wrote a post in praise of a collaboration between PBS News Hour and the Center for Public Integrity which took a twenty-years-after look at story of Erin Brockovich. As you may recall, Brockovich was the crusading law clerk (made famous in a movie starring Julia Roberts) whose work led to multimillion settlement from the California utility company, PG&E, to a residents of a small town in California.
That settlement was based on years of chemical dumping that led to hexavalent chromium contamination of the ground water in that area - and years of a company coverup. As these latest stories pointed out, the ground water is still contaminated (although PG&E is working on a clean up plan) and the town of Hinkley is now pretty a ghost town. The part of the reporting that I found most fascinating was the evidence of the way the company manipulated the state regulatory system following the...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into...
A new report on the state of American journalism found "a continued erosion of news reporting resources," and " a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands."
Those were among the many disturbing conclusions from the latest annual report on American journalism by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report was released earlier this week.
I wasn't inclined to make too much of the report, because it seemed a bit irrelevant to the news industry that I write about. In my opinion, there has never been as much science writing, or as much good science writing, as there is now. And I think that's true of the media generally, not just science journalism. I haven't been this excited about the news business since I was trying to claw my way...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next...
NOVA has an unparalleled reputation and track record for excellence in science journalism on television; no other organization can come close. Yet its attempt to extend its brand to a new science news website--if brand extension is what this is--seems to be off to a very soft start.
NOVA Next, as the site is called, invited me to review it. On Feb. 28, Tim De Chant, the editor of NOVA Next, welcomed readers by saying NOVA would bring to the web the expertise and passion displayed it displays in its television show. This is how he described the venture:
NOVA Next will be focused on big stories, the sort you’re used to hearing from NOVA. We’ll have some of the biggest names in science, technology, and engineering giving us the inside scoop on...
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