Nieman Reports: a review

“The Beat is a Tougher One Today: reporting on the environment requires more and better training of those who do it”

-James Bruggers says that journalists who cover the environment are known in the newsroom as the “parts per million” folks. What he means is: the environmental beat requires precise reporting.

“Gone are the days when I wrote mostly about fanciful ideas like whether the state of Montana should bring buffalo back to its open ranges,” he says. “That debate wasn’t very complicated to understand or convey.”

But now, reporters covering the environment may report on religion one day, business another, economics and science and public policy and government regulations and politics, too. “Some days,” he writes, “journalists who report on environment issues wrestle with all of these topics in one story.”

His suggestion: find the mainstream science and economics experts who can center a story and give it proper context. However, Bruggers warns against merely “reporting what one scientist says and then finding a scientist who disagrees and reporting what that person says.” Rather, he says, environmental journalists need to be able to determine how much information should be weighted in the context of the story.

Bruggers spent the last 20 years reporting on the environmental beat. He’s worked at newspapers in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. He has an M.S. in environmental studies from the University of Montana, with undergraduate degrees in forestry and journalism from UM, as well. He currently covers environmental topics at the (Louisville) Courier-Journal. He’s also a board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists- and was president for two years.

The beat has changed over the years, he says. While he was writing about recycling and endangered plants and animals in California at the beginning of his career, his beat eventually took in “bioterrorism and biowarfare.” Everything from bioengineered corn to anthrax and the West Nile virus is part of the environmental beat.

“In addition to pollution coming from power plants, cars, tractors, trucks and factories,” he says, “I now write about genetic pollution- asking scientists about findings on whether altered genes from a farmer’s field will contaminate the crops of his neighbor.”

While the beat itself has changed, he says that he has changed, too. “I’m far more concerned with how environmental problems affect people than I was when I came out of college.”

But, he admits that sometimes he longs for those days when he just wrote about buffalo in Montana.