SEJ 2007

Video and Audio for Journalists/Scientists Session

Now posted! Feast on your choice of recording of Friday breakfast session Can This Relationship Be Saved? Why Journalists and Scientists Just Don't Communicate.

Why Environmental Journalists Should Care About Targeted Online Ad Networks

lime.com

Could a targeted online ad network like Lime's help support environmental journalism?

(Note: This is an edited version of a post I just made to Poynter's E-Media Tidbits.)

This past Saturday at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference I was part of a plenary panel discussing how the evolution of media (especially online) could or should affect the future of journalism. 

There, I voiced my opinion about how it burns me up that news organizations continue to cut qualified journalists from their payrolls, ostensibly to control costs, while routinely leaving significant money on the table in the form of poorly sold and grossly underutilized online and mobile advertising opportunities. Then, in a Kafkaesque twist, management and journalists alike often whine about how their sites don't make much money.

Considering the key role robust journalism plays in keeping society free, I think that's practically criminal.

(OK, several SEJers complimented me after the plenary for being "forceful." Actually, all the caffeine I sucked down that morning after a too-late Friday night yakking with SEJ friends finally kicked in just as the plenary started. I'm not sure whether that's really a good thing, but so be it.)

Here's the bottom line about what advertisers want, and how that actually can mesh with sound journalistic ethics and independence, thanks to current media technology. And how that might especially benefit the environment and other specialty beats...

Two More Session Audios Available

Two additional audios have been posted to SEJ's conference coverage page. One is for Saturday's Concurrent Sessions 3: THE CLIMATE: Feverish Temperatures: Human Health on a Warmer Planet, where panelists discussed changing ecosystems and their life forms, evolving diseases and the potential impacts on human health. The second is for Sunday's Environmental Myths of the West: Will Your Next Story Be a Lie? with NPR environment correspondent John Nielsen interviewing Patricia Limerick, myth-buster, historian, professor and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Progressive teaching is in

One of the Sept. 7 concurrent sessions 1, Craft II, focused on new ways of teaching and practicing Environmental Journalism.

“We are about working with citizens to solve environmental issues,” said Donica Mensing, associate professor and director of graduate studies at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University Nevada, Reno.

Speakers agreed that the best way to integrate new media is by creating new teaching programs focused on non-linear media, like the Internet, which is a future of journalism. All panelists agreed that we are in a process of change in journalism and we are entering a new era in which traditional journalism is going away.

“Newspaper companies keep laying people off,” said Jane Stevens, multimedia instructor in Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “Journalism is going in different places and it’s looking differently.”

Experts presented their innovative ideas on how this new journalism is addressed to communities. Stevens made an observation that the old way of interacting with community in which journalism was based on an already existing group of residents is going away. Now journalists have to learn how to engage the audience by offering new projects like the www.GreatTurtleRace.com

“This new kind of journalism is building community,” Stevens said...