Publication Items

As government resistance intensifies over sharing public records — especially environmental documents — journalists need to hone their skills to get the information they need to do their jobs and serve their audiences. FOIA expert David Cuillier offers tips and tactics to help you use your reporting time and dollars most effectively and ensure your public records requests produce high-quality results.

A war on the facts behind climate change — and on the actions to address it — is well underway in the second Trump administration. The new WatchDog Opinion column takes the measure of the battlefront, eyeing key examples of the political onslaught, including a concerted effort to eradicate the very term itself. Regulations killed, research discredited, speech censored and more.

Public databases — a boon to good environmental reporting — have long been a priority for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as evidenced in its just-published “open data plan.” But as an analysis in the latest Reporter’s Toolbox notes, that pioneering approach may succumb to Trump 2.0 policies. What’s at stake and what’s already being lost.

Fiction and journalism might seem like polar opposites, but some environmental journalists find writing ecofiction is an ideal complement to their day jobs. Drawing on journalistic research skills and curiosity, ecofiction lets them explore environmental issues from a different angle while enjoying an opportunity to unleash their imaginations. Journalist-fictioneers Valerie Brown and Meg Turville-Heitz on working across genre boundaries.