Saving the world, one news report at a time
Published 12:26 pm Saturday, April 26, 2008
When correspondent Yi-Chuan Peng finished her story at the climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia and pressed Send on her email, her dispatch began a trek through cyberspace.
Nine time zones away her story arrived at a cottage on the shore of Port Madison, landing in the inbox of Environment News Service editor-in-chief Sunny Lewis, just another of the dozens of reports she receives daily.
There are roughly 100 others like Peng in cities around the globe who write for ENS, a digital wire service covering environmental issues.
“The concept has always been the same, with correspondents that write in to a central office,” Lewis said.
Only the location of the central office has changed, as Lewis and husband, managing editor Jim Crabtree, recently relocated from Honolulu to Bainbridge Island. With two computers, a set of telephones and a high-speed internet connection as their only requirements, the couple can operate their network from just about anywhere.
Their move to the Northwest has brought ENS close to where it began 17 years ago in Vancouver, B.C.
Lewis, a New York City native, was working in Vancouver as a radio reporter and was troubled by the light attention being paid to the environment.
She formed the idea for a global network of reporters all contributing to a single source for environmental news, like a specialized Associated Press.
As Lewis began building ENS, using radio contacts to bring on stringers, Crabtree arrived in Vancouver.
The Californian had his first taste of entrepreneurial journalism in the army, where he published uncensored newspapers for individual units. His enterprise didn’t impress superiors.
“That got me in a lot of trouble right away,” he said.
After a restless career as a reporter and a stint as a carpenter, Crabtree traveled to B.C. looking for new open spaces.
In Vancouver, he met Lewis and the pair began slowly expanding ENS. At first they used fax to distribute news, but soon tapped into to the emerging World Wide Web, where in the early 1990s the environmental world was finding a voice in “pumpkin orange” digital text.
“Not many people know it, but environmentalists were the first ones on the Internet after the scientists,” Crabtree said.
The first Gulf War brought ENS exposure in the media world.
The organization had correspondent Will Thomas in the Middle East to cover the environmental toll of the war. Using royal Saudi Arabian contacts, Thomas procured a helicopter and became the first western journalist to photograph oil-drenched beaches and smog-billowing oil field fires in Kuwait.
The photos aired on CNN, and Thomas went on to a career as a magazine and documentary reporter.
He was just one of an ever-changing roster of freelancers ENS has relied on.
“The reporters that come to us over the years are like a family,” Lewis said.
In many countries, she said, correspondents risk their careers and sometimes their lives to be part of the ENS family, though the editors do their best to keep their identities hidden when their work could put them in danger.
A Pakistani native who broke news of his nation’s nuclear weapons program for ENS swiftly came under government scrutiny, and Crabtree and Lewis helped him gain U.S. citizenship.
More recently a Croatian reporter who was working elsewhere for ENS returned to her home nation to check on her family and was never heard from again.
Many of the stringers aren’t actually trained journalists but academics or specialists who have knowledge in a field or the language skills and access to report from another country. A Nevada biologist, for example, writes about mining in South America, when he travels there to study tapirs.
For many of the reporters, English is a second or third language.
Washington Bureau Chief J.R. Pegg, who monitors congress and the White House, is ENS’s only full-time correspondent.
It’s Lewis’ job to field the reports, revise, edit and verify them, and package eight to ten stories together into a bundle of environmental news sent to roughly 50,000 subscribers daily.
“What do people want to know? That’s what I try to answer with my news,” Lewis said. “What’s essential? What do people need to know more than anything today?”
Lewis and Crabtree believe they fill a demand for objectivity amid a field full of activist groups, corporations and governments that spin the news in every direction.
“That’s what we’re really focused on, keeping the news balanced because the environmental world is so polarized,” Crabtree said. “But that leaves the middle open for us to publish balanced news. We took the middle early on, though there’s not much money in the middle.”
Inbox is full
The wire subscription is free, but ENS makes its money by displaying ads on its website, distributing press releases and providing customized content streams to paying customers, including a contract to supply environmental news to NBC’s top ten U.S. markets.
According to Crabtree, who monitors subscriptions, the daily dispatch is read in nearly every major newsroom and government agency in the world; by board members of Fortune 500 companies; and inside the walls of the Pentagon and the Vatican.
The editors are aware of a large base of citizen groups and scholars, as well.
One year they tried charging for their wire subscriptions – $2 a month – but quickly abandoned the fee after loyal but tight-budgeted readers raised a clamor.
Crabtree remembered hearing from scientists studying river dolphins in the Amazon and two researchers working above the arctic circle: “They both wrote to say, ‘Stop, we don’t have Visa cards up here.’”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer environmental reporter Robert McClure reads the ENS dispatch each morning. He said there are swarms of websites and environmental groups pushing stories, but few that take a balanced, international approach.
“It’s probably one of two I check every day to check in on international news,” he said. “They do a nice job.”
Along with the environmental happenings of the day, McClure said he sees stories on ENS that aren’t reported elsewhere. Sometimes it’s breaking news, sometimes its simply an overlooked story, like a recent ENS report about the impact of the crowds trooping through the Galapagos Islands.
“I think everyone would suspect the Galapagos are being overrun by tourists, but it hadn’t been recorded,” McClure said.
Though informative, ENS news comes off a little dry, McClure said.
“Not flashy would be a nice way to put it,” he said. “It’s a ‘just the facts ma’am’ kind of organization, and that’s a good thing.”
“Not flashy” is a compliment for Lewis and Crabtree, who cultivate a writing style of few adjectives and omit adverbs altogether.
The ENS editors say avoiding any hint of judgmental language helps maintain what they consider an unassailable objectivity in their stories.
Despite digesting an inbox full of environmental news each day, Lewis said she has never been tempted to take sides on a professional or personal level.
“I don’t want to be an activist, because I was formed as a journalist very early in my career,” she said. “I have never been a joiner of groups.”
Though they’ve had offers, Lewis said they have turned down potential investors to maintain control of their content.
“The reason people want to invest is because they want to manipulate,” Lewis said. “One of the joys of reporting is being able to think my own thoughts. I don’t want to give that up, you can’t buy that from me.”
What the pair will advocate is awareness. They said they like that Bainbridge is involved as a community in actively charting its future, something they didn’t see in Honolulu.
On a broader scale, the last few years have been some of the most exciting for Lewis and Crabtree as they watched popular issues like climate change drive the environment to the forefront of the global conscience.
Lewis said they have seen a new urgency break down once insurmountable barriers between Democrats and Republicans, environmentalists and sportsmen, and once energy-hungry corporations now forwarding conservation initiatives.
“Alliances are being formed that have never formed before, because of the environment,” Lewis said. “This is only quite new, maybe over the last four or five years. And it’s growing and intensifying.”
