August 4, 2006
San Francisco

Dave Poulson
Associate Director, Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, Michigan State University

Hi, I'm the associate director of something called the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, and basically what we do is we teach students how to cover the environmental angle of every story they write, regardless of their beat. We also have a substantial professional outreach component. We do a lot of workshops and conferences, both in the United States and overseas.

This fall I'm co-teaching a class that will design and market a citizen journalism effort that covers environmental issues in the Great Lakes region. This project, I think, is unusual both in terms of how we define the community and perhaps by some of the tools we hope to use.

Like other citizen journalism efforts, this community is certainly defined by geography. We've got a lot of water; something like 18 percent of the world's fresh surface water. It covers a whole lot of land, and because it covers a whole lot of land we stretch across a lot of political boundaries: a couple countries, eight states, two provinces, and, oh, by the way, 33 million people.

That's not as bad as it sounds. More important – perhaps more unusual – is our community is defined by a focus on the idea of the Great Lakes. The community's interest is defined by how something effects the region's environment, and that excludes a whole lot of those 33 million people who are clearly oblivious, but it also includes a whole bunch of people who may not live nearby, but they get real warm and fuzzy about a natural resource that you can see from outer space.

The other unusual aspect of the project is that we plan to use tools popularized by Wikipedia. Probably every body knows about wiki but just in case you're not, the key concept to know here is that anyone can contribute, anyone can edit anyone else's material, and the truth of an entry is debated in discussions behind those entries.

Here you can see that there across the top there are tabs. There's a tab for the article, there's a tab for the discussion, there's a tab that lets you go in and muck up that entry and there's a tab for history, showing how that entry happened to evolve.

This, of course, is the ultimate in interactivity, and it also poses some problems so severe that about a year and a half ago I wrote a column in our center's magazine decrying the very use of this technology.

Let me give you an idea of what I wrote: "Set aside the challenges of writing a graceful entry with multiple fingers in the pie, what does this communal effort mean to trust? How can readers believe articles that can change daily depending on who – expert or otherwise – sticks an oar in."

That's pretty much the traditional criticism of Wikipedia. I guess you have to forgive me, I think I'm what Dan Gillmor yesterday characterized as a "recovering traditional journalist," still gripped by a love of traditional journalism, and I certainly do love it.

So what changed my mind to the point that I actually applied to Jan's organization [J-Lab] for funding to create my own wiki?

It wasn't a sudden flash of inspiration, but the more I read about some of the wiki research, the more I became excited by the potential of the technology for environmental news, my own little corner of the journalism world.

Here's my motivation: I'm convinced that the environment is the biggest, yet most underreported story that's out there.

I tell my students that war is a pretty big story and so is poverty and so is economy, but as big as they are, nothing trumps the fate of the planet, and those big stories have their roots in conflicts over natural resource shortages. And yet, as I said, the environment story remains severely underreported.

Simply put, the story is too big and too important to leave only to professional journalists. As a reporter, I often interviewed highly informed citizens who lived an issue for years – the same issue that I spent mere days, or perhaps hours, reporting. So why not let them directly report what they know?

The other thing that kind of swung me into the wiki camp was that, as you know, I work for a university, and universities should be all about experimenting.

There are some spin-off benefits here. When this gets off the ground I'll have gained a powerful teaching tool. I teach a course called "Environmental Investigative Reporting," and my students do real good work and sometimes, despite that real good work, they have difficulty finding a place to publish what they've discovered. This project gives me that place.

It's a platform for me to teach traditional investigating methods – how to find stories, how to present them – and my colleague, who's running the technical aspects of the show, gains a platform to teach the technology.

It's an outlet for other students – students who don't particularly care about the environment, yet they're interested in giving a shot at some of these convergence tools.

I have a student who's interning at the Dallas Morning News this summer and she chided me recently for never teaching her Web video, a skill she says that many of that paper's reporters are expected to know. Now I have a platform to do that – unfortunately I don't have a skill set to do that. [Audience laughs]

But I think I better pick one up pretty fast, or else hire it.

This project is going to give me plenty of excuses, I think, to discuss journalistic ethics.

Let me show you something that really floats my boat. This is a piece that appeared in The Washington Post last May, and basically what it is is a story about a convoy of water trucks moving from one place in Iraq to the other. The Washington Post reporter was on board the convoy and reported about what happened, including a firefight. It was a great piece, well written, extremely well edited. And that image in the corner there – he happened to have a video recorder with him when he got involved in the firefight, and you click on that image and, boy, that's a pretty significant, powerful statement.

So how can I work that type of thing into an environmental news service?

Well, you know, we should be teaching our students how to do that video, but I got thinking, too, about this whole aspect of YouTube and Google Video and how to leverage that for journalism. Lo and behold, I got onto YouTube, and I stumbled across a video.

We've got this thing that we're worried about that's called the Eurasian carp. It's moving up the Illinois River system, and the thing about the carp is it eats a whole lot, and it's kind of an eating machine that can change the whole ecology of the lakes. So there's actually an electrical barrier around Chicago trying to keep this fish out, but I'm pretty sure it's inevitable that we're going to get it and it's working its way up the river. Kind of the neat thing about this carp is it's very large and it jumps out of the water. It jumps out of the water so far and so fast that it's been known to knock people out of boats. I always thought that was a neat thing. I never quite believed it until I saw this video that's called "Asian Carp in Illinois River." If you look carefully, you're going to see some leaping Asian carp, and that's kind of a cool thing that you might be able to augment a story about the Asian carp with. But I was talking to a staffer of ours who's not a journalist but he does video work, so I showed this to him and I said, "You know this is pretty exciting stuff." And he says, "That's nothing. Take a look at this one."

So I've got this video of a drunken fisherman out in a river, and you watch him for a little bit, and he gets slapped upside the head by a carp. And pretty soon you'll notice that his boat gets filled up with carp, and I guess we don't have audio here, but it's pretty incomprehensible. So I said, "Well what's he saying?" And this staffer says, "I don't know, he's some drunken fisherman. But isn't that pretty interesting?" So someone's walking by in the hall who speaks Spanish and I said, "Come listen to what this guy has to say." And he said, "I don't understand what he has to say, but I think that's Portuguese." So I was looking at those fish, and I'm no ichthyologist, but I don't think that's an Asian carp, they're too skinny. And the staffer says, "Who cares? A flying fish is a flying fish, right?"

Well we did a little bit of investigation and found out that this was actually taken in the Brazilian rainforest and it's not an Asian carp, which is kind of a good ethical issue there, as well.

So my question is if something like this got onto our site, would the wiki community recognize that and remove it? And that's kind of an exciting thing that we hope to track as well.

What excites me about experiments like this is it really can tap some university resources. We have something at Michigan State called the voice library that I'm real excited about and hoping to use and integrate some of the audio. They've got audio of Great Lakes ship captains, some historical figures and things like that. I think we might be able to leverage a number of interview tapes that a former New York Times environmental reporter donated to us that he had for two books he wrote during the heyday of the environmental movement, including some real interesting leaders like Lois Gibbs, who is the housewife who started the whole Love Canal thing. I think we can tap into those kinds of resources as well.

We operate a news service, which is called Michigan's Echo. I have a student who goes out on the Web everyday and finds all the environmental news stories in the daily newspapers in the state of Michigan, writes a quick summary of each one and links back to the original story. It sends it out in an e-mail and is also delivered by RSS feed.

There's a group here called the Michigan Mountain Biking Association who takes our RSS feed and takes only the recreational land stories and feeds it into their forum. People engage with those stories, add content basically – not necessarily fact-based content – but a lot of interesting discussion as well.

I'm interested in maybe integrating that with what we're doing with Great Lakes stories. It's kind of interesting, the guy I'm teaching this class with is less interested. I don't think he wants to be tainted by traditional media, so we'll have some interesting discussions about this.

As a land grant university we've got a cooperative extension network with an outreach mandate. I certainly hope to leverage those resources as we market this thing because you know it's not going to be successful unless I can get the citizens doing the work.

This service prompts some research questions worthy of investigation by the University. Can you enforce a neutral point of view in a news service much smaller than Wikipedia? Will there be enough people watching to keep it honest? And this is the one that really bothers me: Will it be captured by activist groups? Or will Dow Chemical Company hire some guy to just go on the site everyday and delete every bad reference about Dow Chemical?

Can we engage business, industry, political and, perhaps most important, scientific groups? Can we get scientists to weigh in and fix the science when it's wrong?

We're hardly the first effort at creating a Great Lakes online community. This is something produced by the binational Great Lakes Commission. It focuses on something called the 43 areas of concern – "area of concern" is government speak for tax pool. And what's interesting to us about that is that each one of these areas of concern had a citizen advisory group attached to it. Now the Great Lakes Commission gives them a dot on a map; we want to give them a voice.

It's extremely bureaucratic, and that's too bad. They've got a lot of good information up there, but if you tread through this opening paragraph it's pretty bad stuff.

By the way, they're upset at us for doing this. They're saying, "Why are you doing this. We already do this. You're just duplicating our effort, and if you do this all these citizens and all these students are going to call us up and ask us for information." [Audience laughs]

Well heaven forbid that the government has to be responsive to the citizens it serves! [More laughs]

I'll give you something on the other side. This is something from Ted Nugent – every body knows Ted Nugent, I hope, or maybe not – he's Michigan's famous rock star, known as the Motor City Madman. He also calls himself the Whack Master because he likes to kill stuff – hunt and fish. Now let me give you an idea of what Ted puts out on his very popular hunting and fishing site.

"Mother Nature can bitch but we still love the hell out of the old gal. Never before has nature been more important to us – real nature: the pecking order, tooth, fang and claw."

That's just kind of a minor flavor; this guy's way out there.

But Nugent's got an environmental message that appeals to young rock 'n' roll fans, and old rock 'n' roll fans – politically conservative old white guys who like to kill deer. That's the kind of demographic spread that can lead to greater understanding of environmental values and it's a segment of the Great Lakes environmental community I'd like to hear from.

Here's another one. This is The Great Lakes Town Hall. This is put together by the "elite granola crunchers," you know. This is where the National Wildlife Federation members go and the Sierra Club members go and they're interesting. They're real smart, they're extremely polarizing and I think they represent a real strong potential partner for us.

There's one quick thing to wind up. If you're not familiar with ePluribus Media, they do these interactive timelines, and here's one that the Palm Beach Post did. Look at an environmental or any kind of issue, click on a date, and you might get a government data set, you might get connected to a news story, or you might get a piece of video.

They did one on Hurricane Katrina that starts 10 years before the hurricane ever hit. The idea is that very small events years ago can have huge impact later on.

Just to wind up, I'd like to tell you I know what I'm doing. I think that this is an important test bed for new journalism – whatever that is. I'm not sure that I'm smart enough to come up with the next big thing in journalism, but I think what I can do is kind of point my students toward trying to develop that themselves, so maybe they'll come up with the next big thing in journalism, and I think that's a pretty important role for a journalism school to play.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Where does the site live?

DAVE POULSON: Well, right now it doesn't. It will be on a university site and there's some controversy and some discussion about that, and if we don't get those issues resolved maybe we'll have to move it somewhere else.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What are your early marketing plans as far as getting the word out?

DAVE POULSON: We've already done that. Actually what we've done is we've called in a whole bunch of citizen groups from a variety of different environmental organizations, including those people in those 43 areas of concern.

The hilarious thing – you know, I'm one of the last few people in America who does not own a cell phone – but because we brought these people in and started talking to them, I'm being asked to come in and talk to them about how they can use technology to enliven their efforts, which I actually turned down because I really don't know how to do that. That shows it's kind of fun to mess around with.

We're pushing the environmental organizations pretty hard first, because the government and business and industry groups already have a significant Web presence out there doing similar types of things – well, not similar; we're something altogether different. That makes me a little nervous, though. I do not want to get driven by the environmental organizations and I think that's a real concern.

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