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Environmental
journalists fight skeptical editors to get their stories about earth,
water and air into the news - By Pavel Antonov
My boss disagreed. "We've had enough of all that environmental ..." She left the sentence unfinished. "Why don't you go get me a political scandal instead?" The wetlands did not make the evening news. In the years since, I've often thought about this editor's poor appreciation for the importance of that water to Sofians. She didn't care about it and her disregard meant that our viewers never heard about it. I came to realise my experience was not isolated. It seemed, in fact, that most news editors in my country, and countries throughout the Balkans for that matter, had little interest in the environment as a news topic. A 2002 REC survey of environmental journalism in the Balkans revealed that only three out of 37 Balkan environmental journalists published a story about the environment each day. Some file such stories two or three times a week, some once weekly, and many even less frequently. Then I read about Geoffrey Lean -- the long time doyen of environmental correspondents in the UK. After years of covering environmental news for the Observer, Lean's editor got fed-up and said: "We've had enough of all that eco-bollox!" That rebuff features in a UK study of environmental journalism by Joe Smith called "The Daily Globe: Environmental Change, the Public and the Media." Although my former chief editor would not be able to pronounce it, the "eco-bollox" syndrome seems to afflict editors all over the former Soviet bloc. The good news is that this common problem may well have a common remedy: good sources, good contacts and good stories. The Balkan journalists who responded to the 2002 REC survey revealed that these were their main needs, and this served as a guide for a regional assistance initiative called the Regional Environmental Press Centre network (REPC.net). Launched with financial help from the government of the Netherlands, the network was a partnership between the Environmental Press Centre -- a non-profit association of environmental journalists in Skopje -- and the REC. Its work covered Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, and Kosovo (territory under interim UN administration). Local organisations joined as resource points. Journalists exchanged information through a web portal at REPC.net. They put together a regional newsletter, SEE Environment Watch. The REC's database of environmental media experts was made available to them and updated by the country resource points. An international committee of media experts, journalists and nature protection activists from the region supervised and advised the REPC. Two of the three initial goals were therefore achieved -- good sources of information were established and good contacts were made. The third one -- the publishing of good stories -- turned out to be the toughest. Young and inexperienced in most cases, environmental reporters throughout the Balkans required hands-on professional training. Paul Brown, the environmental writer for the Guardian, shared his methods at a training session in Ohrid, FYR Macedonia. Twelve reporters worked on a story about the pollution of Lake Ohrid, and got tips from Brown on how to sell the story to their editors. Tip number one was to forget "environment" and focus on things that matter to people: health, food, money and traveling. Every environmental story encapsulates one or more of these elements. In the month following the workshop, articles written in the workshop appeared in the Guardian and ten media outlets throughout the region. The central topic was common, Lake Ohrid. But the stories focused on angles as diverse as recreation, pollution and economic problems. All the stories were good and merited public attention. No surprise for me, though. I always knew water makes for good stories. — Find professional services and assistance for journalists at media.rec.org |
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