Environmental Journalism Research Articles

Analysis on Environmental Journalism and the Challenges of Journalists in Sri Lanka

This research seeks to explore the challenges of environmental journalists in Sri Lankan newspapers. To carry out the objectives of the research, qualitative methodology was employed. Primary data were collected through in-depth interview method. The research concluded that journalists are facing a plethora of challenges such as editors’ lack of knowledge about environmental issues and science, lack of support from editors, lack of facilities such proper professional training for journalists, pressures from management of the newspaper with the space allocation, influences of advertisers and politicians, and complexity of environmental issues, and problems of getting information from the sources. In addition, according to responses of the participants, it is concluded that environmental journalism is not well-established in Sri Lanka, not having in-depth analysis on the environment. Comparing with Sunday Times newspaper, it is shown that Irida Lankadeepa newspaper and editors are not interested in the environment, and they have not allocated specific space for the environment. Furthermore, they pointed out that the reason for not to grant priority for the environment is environmental journalism is created by non-government organisations and their hidden intentions.

Panorama da pesquisa em Jornalismo Ambiental no Brasil: o estado da arte nas dissertações e teses entre 1987 e 2010

O artigo tece um panorama da pesquisa sobre Jornalismo Ambiental no Brasil por meio do mapeamento e análise das dissertações e teses sobre o assunto que estão cadastradas no Banco de Teses da Capes no período de 1987 a 2010. A partir da abordagem qualitativa, fez-se uma análise descritiva nos resumos dos trabalhos buscando identificar os temas, referenciais teórico-metodológicos, objetos empíricos, relação com a educação e conceituação de Jornalismo Ambiental; para a elaboração de percentuais e gráficos, fez-se uso da análise quantitativa. O esmiuçamento dos 101 resumos encontrados permitiu que se detectasse em qual região existe maior fomento e interesse na área, o referencial mais utilizado, as lacunas mais recorrentes, dentre outros aspectos que caracterizam os estudos de estado da arte. Além das contribuições sobre como está sendo investigado o Jornalismo Ambiental no País, verificou-se que a compreensão deste conceito não está clara nem entre os próprios pesquisadores do assunto.

Application of Geospatial Information System for the Study of Illuminance in Carpet Weaving Workshops in Bokan, Iran

Vision is a vital sense in humans, who chiefly acquire knowledge of their surroundings through sight. Sufficient light is essential for good vision, and poor lighting potentially leads to a variety of disorders such as eyestrain, ocular headache, defective vision, physical fatigue, and mental complications (1). Furthermore, low luminance contributes to accidents such as falling and human errors. The more delicate and accurate the employment task, the more attention needs to be paid to lighting in the Background: Carpet weaving is an occupation that requires sufficient and appropriate lighting. The lighting in carpet weaving workshops affects the productivity and the physical and mental health of workers. Therefore, the evaluation of the illumination and the identification of work stations requiring lighting modifications will be helpful in promotion of the health and safety of workers in carpet weaving workshops. Methods: This study was carried out for the evaluation of illumination on the basis of Geospatial Information System (GIS) technology in two carpet weaving workshops of Bokan city. As per the norms of Illumination Engineering Society, the sensors of the photometer Testo 545 were placed at lowest and highest of 35 and 163 cm in workshop I, and at 40 and 245 cm in workshop II, which correspond to the lowest and highest work surfaces in the respective workshops. Total, natural, and artificial illuminance was measured in the center of each measurement station using the photometer, and data was analyzed using the Arc GIS software. The maximum and minimum illuminances as well as isolux curves were obtained for each workshop. Results: The illuminance in workshops I and II were found to be lower and higher, respectively, than 200 lux, which is considered the standard for carpet weaving workshops. Thus, improving the artificial lighting system or redesigning it is essential for ensuring that the standard conditions of illuminance (200–300 lux) are provided. Discussion: This study showed that the application of GIS technology renders the assessment of illumination in carpet weaving workshops possible. This assessment method could also prove useful for determining the exact stations in the carpet weaving workshops that need modifications, thereby leading to cost reduction. Journal of Human, Environment, and Health Promotion

News and Announcements

News and Announcements

Being Objective With a Personal Perspective

This article examines what objectivity means to 15 environmental journalists at two Chinese newspapers and how this value guides their practices. It reveals that although objectivity is central to their journalistic ethos, the participants see it as ethical to organize reports within a framework arising from their personal judgments of news events. The appropriation and particular definition of the American journalistic norm of objectivity increases the participants’ political safety and justifies them in playing their perceived role as guardians of society and educators. In so doing, they negotiate with other social actors and consolidate their cultural authority over defining reality.

A Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

I wish to send a quick note to the readership and authors of BECT. As you know, many journals provide periodic communications to their readership. Owing to this, I have decided to occasionally provide a note to complement the monthly issues of BECT. In addition, I have asked BECT’s Senior Editor’s, on occasion, to contribute an ‘‘Editor’s Note’’ when they feel that an important issue requires further insight or when a specific paper should be highlighted. Please see the ‘‘Editor’s Note’’ in this issue of BECT that highlights a paper about the detection of mercury in Notothenioid fish collected from the Antarctic. New to BECT: We are starting a new type of submission: ‘‘Focused Reviews’’. This type of submission will be like a ‘‘Mini Review’’ that will focus on current topics that we feel are timely and are important to the scientific community. I am pleased to announce that BECT’s first ‘‘Focused Review’’ was published in the October, 2015, issue of BECT. Please see the ‘‘Focused Review’’ entitled ‘‘Impacts of Contaminants on the Ecological Role of Lotic Biofilms’’, Feckler et al. (95) 421–427. This review highlights the current knowledge on how autotrophic and heterotrophic biofilms can be modulated as a response to chemical stress. The Editors of BECT are currently working on additional invited submissions. Finally, I am very excited to announce that 2016 is the 50th Anniversary of BECT. This is a highly important milestone for BECT, placing it as one of the early environmental journals of this particular genre. All in all, we should be very proud of this accomplishment, as this journal was established on the heels of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and prior to the development of many of the Acts and Agencies that currently regulate environmental issues and policies worldwide. Thus, it is very important that this anniversary is made relevant and celebrated by the scientific community. I, together with the Editors, would like to formally invite you to be part of this celebration by contributing to BECT in 2016. If you would like to submit an Editorial or a paper that highlights the history of BECT and its role in environmental research, please feel free to contact me.

The end of plenty: the race to feed a crowded world

When the demographer Robert Malthus (1766-1834) famously outlined the brutal relationship between food and population, he never imagined the success of modern scientific agriculture. In the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented agricultural advancement known as the Green Revolution brought hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and improved irrigation that drove the greatest population boom in history-but left ecological devastation in its wake. In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our race to feed the world in dramatic perspective. With a skyrocketing world population and tightening global grain supplies spurring riots and revolutions, humanity must produce as much food in the next four decades as it has since the beginning of civilization to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe. Yet climate change could render half our farmland useless by century's end. Writing with an agronomist's eye for practical solutions and a journalist's keen sense of character, detail, and the natural world, Bourne takes readers from his family farm to international agricultural hotspots to introduce the new generation of farmers and scientists engaged in the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. He discovers young, corporate cowboys trying to revive Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist channeling ancient Chinese traditions, the visionary behind the world's largest organic sugar-cane plantation, and many other extraordinary individuals struggling to increase food supplies-quickly and sustainably-as droughts, floods, and heat waves hammer crops around the globe. Part history, part reportage and advocacy, The End of Plenty is a panoramic account of the future of food, and a clarion call for anyone concerned about our planet and its people.

The Epistemology of Environmental Journalists

This paper offers a case study of the epistemology of Chinese environmental investigative journalists, drawn from 42 in-depth interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013. The study proposes that it is the knowledge that journalists form, rather than whether the knowledge is objective, which is important for understanding the epistemology of environmental investigative journalists. The analysis reveals that four types of knowledge are central to what participants come to know about environmental issues in the process of validating evidence and making judgments. The importance of experience, cognition and evidence-based judgment in the knowledge formation process means there is an inevitable (but covert) involvement of journalists’ subjectivity in their reports. This suggests that the participants practise an advocacy and ethnographic journalism, characterised by pragmatism, existentialism and particular standpoints, while making a strong claim to “truth”. These standpoints are generated in the pre-writing investigation stage rather than in the writing-up stage. Therefore, in this case study, the epistemology of environmental investigative journalism is concerned with how and when meanings and opinions are generated in the process of knowledge acquisition, rather than whether the knowledge is objective.

Tradução entre saberes: construção teórica para o debate ambiental no telejornalismo do Sul

A atualidade marcada pelo saber científico num movimento de mudança de paradigma, coloca a ecologia no centro das relações de poder. Este artigo reflete sobre os fatores sociais e culturais conflituosos que obstaculizam a prática democrática de uma representação das questões ambientais através do jornalismo e suas especificidades culturais, de relacionamento com a ciência e com a sociedade, em tempo pós-colonial. Pensamento que compreende a importância da informação ambiental, na televisão, como motivadora do debate entre os atores sociais no contexto social da língua portuguesa, e que evoca um telejornalismo ambiental como práxis discursiva de tradução entre saberes no espaço público.

Framing Renewable Energy: A Comparative Study of Newspapers in Australia and Sweden

Australia and Sweden display very different institutional settings and contexts for the production of environmental journalism. This empirical study examined how two major quality newspapers in Sweden and Australia have framed renewable energy as an environmental, political, scientific, economic and civil society issue. A deductive, quantitative methodological approach was used to identify dominant frames and actors in articles in The Australian (Australia) and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) between October 2010 and June 2011 2010/2011. The findings suggest that the attention given to different types of renewable energy in the two newspapers and how issues were framed was contingent on the domestication of the discussion of renewable energy in the two countries. Reporting on renewable energy in both newspapers was characterized by a focus on “elite” actors and economic frames, the absence of civil society frames and negative (The Australian) or ambiguous (Dagens Nyheter) environmental frames. The study extends our understanding of the contextual conditions that enable and limit journalists when reporting environmental issues.

Defining criteria for good environmental journalism and testing their applicability: An environmental news review as a first step to more evidence based environmental science reporting.

While the quality of environmental science journalism has been the subject of much debate, a widely accepted benchmark to assess the quality of coverage of environmental topics is missing so far. Therefore, we have developed a set of defined criteria of environmental reporting. This instrument and its applicability are tested in a newly established monitoring project for the assessment of pieces on environmental issues, which refer to scientific sources and therefore can be regarded as a special field of science journalism. The quality is assessed in a kind of journalistic peer review. We describe the systematic development of criteria, which might also be a model procedure for other fields of science reporting. Furthermore, we present results from the monitoring of 50 environmental reports in German media. According to these preliminary data, the lack of context and the deficient elucidation of the evidence pose major problems in environmental reporting.

How We Speak When We Say Things about Ourselves in Social Media: A Semiotic Analysis of Content Curation

How We Speak When We Say Things about Ourselves in Social Media: A Semiotic Analysis of Content Curation

English

English

Building synergy - an introduction to the inaugural issue

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural issue of The International Journal of Geohazards and Environment (IJGE). The purpose of this journal is to provide an international open forum for researchers and practitioners to publish scholarly and high quality original papers, state-ofthe-art reviews and case studies on a wide range of topics relevant to geological and geotechnical hazards. These hazards may include natural disasters, such as, landslides, debris flows, earthquakes and sinkholes, and ground instabilities associated with human activities, such as, slope failure in open pit mining and transportation infrastructures, foundation failure in geotechnical construction, subsidence caused by subsurface excavation and rock burst in underground mining. Environmental issues associated with these hazards are also within the scope of this journal. The intension is to provide everyone involved in these fields an opportunity to share findings from their work and exchange ideas in tackling the associated problems. It all started with conversations with peers during international conferences dated back a decade ago, when we noticed that there had not been an international journal dedicated to covering the wide range of aforementioned topics in geohazards. The idea of establishing such a journal grew stronger in recent years during which I had opportunities to work with colleagues in other fields, such as debris flows and earthquakes, when I noticed tremendous similarities with rock engineering in many cases. After consultation with many colleagues and a busy period of preparation over the past year, this multidisciplinary journal has finally debuted today, covering the areas of natural disasters and ground instability induced by human activities.

Front Matter

The Pittsburgh Journal of Environmental and Public Health Law (PJEPHL) is published annually by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh under the editorial control of students of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, 3900 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. PJEPHL can be contacted by email at pjephl@pitt.edu. PJEPHL is freely available to readers worldwide at http://pjephl.law.pitt.edu. PJEPHL is printed by Western Newspaper Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana. Copyright for each work contained in this issue is retained by the author and under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Covering global warming in dubious times: Environmental reporters in the new media ecosystem

With every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the predicted consequences of global warming become increasingly dire. Yet public engagement on the issue, particularly in the United States, lags far behind what is required for collective action. There is therefore an urgent need for vigorous and engaging journalism on climate science and policy-making. Unfortunately, the profession of journalism is currently experiencing an unprecedented period of ferment, as media firms experiment with new ways to expand profits in a rapidly changing media ecosystem. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article examines how environmental journalists have coped with the challenge of covering climate change in the context of a restructuring news industry. The interviews reveal that, despite the challenges they face – particularly regarding the complexity of the issue and their own economic insecurity – environmental journalists have developed a number of creative strategies for getting climate change stories past editors and in front of audiences. A concluding section draws on a cultural industries approach to studying media institutions in order to evaluate both the promise and limits of these individual acts of creativity.

Report on the two‐phase public consultation on the draft EFSA scientific opinion on bisphenol A (BPA)

Report on the two‐phase public consultation on the draft EFSA scientific opinion on bisphenol A (BPA)

The changing nature of environmental discourse: An exploratory comparison of environmental journalists and bloggers

Abstract In this study we present an exploratory comparison of environmental journalists and environmental bloggers. Using a web survey, we compared environmental journalists and bloggers across a range of different variables that the literature shows matter in understanding the environmental discussions that they produce. This study offers important insights about the people behind the mediated messages we get about the environment. We found that environmental journalists and environmental bloggers are similar and different at the same time. They have the same level of concern and perceived knowledge about the environment. But they also conceive of different roles in society and source their information differently. We discuss the implications of these findings on the evolving nature of environmental reporting and discourse.

Book Review: Keya Acharya and Frederick Noronha, The Green Pen: Environmental Journalism in India and South Asia

Keya Acharya and Frederick Noronha, The Green Pen: Environmental Journalism in India and South Asia. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 2009, 312 pages, ₹ 295.

Environmental Journalism as a Management Tool for Poverty Reduction: Considerations on Albanian Current Developments

The paper is conceived on an empirical study explaining the relationship between different actors dealing with environmental and poverty reduction issues, such as journalists, NGOs as well as educational institutions, aiming to raise the public awareness and participation while proposing concrete policies for improvement. Interviews and surveys have been conducted to better understand if the link between the environmental communicators and the civil society is actually at the level of efficiency it should to bring the significant change they are expected to. As current developments stress the linking environmental concerns with poverty reduction measures for sustainability, the study answers questions on the level of knowledge and training journalists gain since during their higher education as well as through common environmental focused activities with local environmental NGOs. Conclusions raise problems about lack of proper specialization of journalists, and the need for a better cooperation between different stakeholders in order to achieve sustainability and concrete results. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p187