What: Our main goal at the Earth Journalism Network is to empower and enable journalists from developing countries to cover the environment more effectively.

How: We will achieve this by establishing networks of environmental journalists in countries where they don’t exist, and building their capacity where they do, through training workshops, support for production and distribution, and dispersing small grants. The network will not only allow journalists to support each other, but also help them to gain increased access to foreign markets for their stories, in part through developing our own programming for satellite, cable and public television. This media-based version of social entrepreneurship will ensure that important environmental stories from developing countries reach a larger international audience, and provide journalists with critical financial support, enabling them to cover important stories which otherwise go untold.

Two of the most critical elements in building the Earth Journalism Network will be establishing a system of communications and support that allows these journalists to collaborate rather than work as isolated individuals, and developing a training and exchange program that will primarily focus on environmental journalists from developing countries, but also include American journalists. Classroom sessions will be interspersed with field trips, to allow the participants plenty of opportunities to practice their craft. Besides delving into reporting, writing and broadcasting techniques and key environmental issues, training will cover such skills as:

• maintaining a balance of sources and views when covering controversial issues;
• making difficult scientific concepts easier to understand;
• balancing environmental and development issues by integrating analysis of ecological concerns with economic, social and political concerns;
• not just focusing on environmental problems, but also creating interesting stories out of solutions;
• carrying out investigative work and finding good data;
• working with different sources, including academics, businesses, government officials and local people; covering local, national and global angles of environmental issues;
• separating the facts from the spin from corporate and environmental organizations; and
• negotiating newsroom politics and lobbying editors and producers to make environmental stories more prominent.

Why: Our planet’s environmental future will be decided in the developing world. Home to four fifths of the world’s population, the world’s fastest growing economies, and the richest remaining pockets of biodiversity, these countries will ultimately determine just how drastically our climate will change, how many species go extinct, and to what extent our food chain becomes contaminated.

The local media play a critical role in influencing how governments and societies balance growth with sustainability. Unfortunately, environmental news is given short shrift almost everywhere, particularly in the developing world, where reporters are often assigned to cover this least prestigious of beats without any training in environmental or scientific issues.

By the same token, journalists in industrialized countries like the US are often surprisingly ignorant about the developing world, and how environmental problems there are inextricably tied into other issues, such as development. In short, although it’s now widely acknowledged that environmental problems spread easily beyond political boundaries, media coverage has not followed suit. And that’s a shame, because one of the best ways to understand the situation at home is to examine what’s happening abroad.

The dearth of environmental coverage in general and of international news in particular, is an increasingly serious shortcoming in this age of globalization. As trade and investment moves ever more quickly from country to country, the need for environmental journalists to obtain and report on information from abroad is becoming critical. It is not just that dirty industries are seeking out pollution havens in places with lax regulations – although that certainly does occur – but that the solutions to environmental problems being devised by innovative companies, academics, communities and non-profit groups also go under-reported.

This is in fact part of a far larger issue: the media everywhere tend to emphasize environmental problems – and the conflicts and crises that arise from them – while neglecting to report on solutions. The result of all this negativity is apathy in a public that now often shrugs its shoulders at “environmental doomsayers”. So journalists need to be armed not only with the knowledge of how to grapple with these problems, but with the skill to turn all the experts’ jargon and complexity into appealing stories.

Environmental journalists in the developing world need training, yes, but they need far more. They need a network of colleagues they can rely on and trusty data sources they can turn to when looking for specialized information and solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. They also desperately need a distribution system to market their stories far and wide. This should have the added benefit of providing additional income streams, and where that is not sufficient, small grants can help them investigate critical stories.

Who: James Fahn, an environmental journalist and author who spent a decade working in SE Asia and was subsequently a program associate at the Ford Foundation, is the Executive Director of EJN. Gary Strieker, until recently CNN International’s lead correspondent for environmental reporting, will serve as President. Larry Fahn, the president of the Sierra Club, has also agreed sit on EJN’s Advisory Board.

When: The Earth Journalism Network has already carried out its first training programs, training TV journalists in Indonesia in October of 2004 and radio journalists in Mexico in February, 2005. For further information or a concept paper, please contact James Fahn

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