environment – Page 4 – Montana Journalism

February 5, 2016 montanajournalism Events, guests, J-School, Student

Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Journalist to Lecture at UM

Journalist and novelist Ken Wells will deliver the eighth annual Jeff Cole Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 29, in the University of Montana School of Law Room 101. The event, hosted by the UM School of Journalism, is free and open to the public.

photo of Ken Wells standing on a mountain edge after a hike. — Wells also dabbles in blues and jazz guitar and songwriting and cooks a mean Cajun gumbo.

The talk, “Not Your Grandpa’s Business News: Confessions of an Accidental Business Journalist,” is part of a series of lectures honoring Jeff Cole, a 1980 UM School of Journalism alumnus who worked as an aerospace editor at The Wall Street Journal and died in a plane crash while on assignment in 2001.

According to the bio on his website (http://bayoubro.com/), Wells grew up in Bayou Black, Louisiana, where his father “was a part-time alligator hunter and snake collector and full-time payroll clerk for a local sugar mill” and his mother was “a homemaker and gumbo chef extraordinaire.” Wells began writing stories for his hometown paper when he was 19 years old and served as editor from 1973 to 1975. After graduating from the master’s program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald for four years and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his series on how an agribusiness drainage system was destroying the Everglades.

Wells joined The Wall Street Journal in San Francisco in 1982, covering a variety of stories across the West and writing the popular Page 1 “middle column” feature. He transferred to its London branch in 1990 and traveled extensively, reporting on the first Persian Gulf War and nonracial democracy in South Africa. Wells moved to the New York branch in 1993 and worked as both a writer and editor, with two of his reporters winning Pulitzers. While working in New York, he won the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ distinguished headline-writing award in 1994. He joined Bloomberg News in 2009.

Wells also has written five novels about Cajun culture in Louisiana and two nonfiction narratives. He has edited two anthologies of The Wall Street Journal’s front-page stories. He currently serves as an adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s graduate School of Journalism. He received an honorary doctorate from Nicholls State University and an induction as a Louisiana Legend by Louisiana Public Broadcasting in 2009.

In 2015 Wells left Bloomberg News to work on a book about the “social and cultural history of gumbo.” It is scheduled to be published in 2017. To read more about Wells, visit his website at http://bayoubro.com/.

Founded in 1914, the School of Journalism is now in its second century of preparing students to think critically, to act ethically and to communicate effectively. They were recently named as one of the “Top Ten” journalism programs in the country by the Radio Television Digital News Association. Check out the website at jour.umt.edu.

This news release is also online at:http://bit.ly/1nADY6G

February 1, 2016February 2, 2016 montanajournalism Events, Graduate, J-School, Student

Biogeochemistry Professor and J-school Collaborate through NSF Grant

When University of Montana biogeochemistry Professor Cory Cleveland begins a new project in Panama this summer, a young journalist will be coming along for the ride.

Cleveland will build on his long-held conviction that “a fundamental piece of good science is to communicate it effectively,” when he embeds a graduate student from UM’s Master’s program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism with his research team to document their fieldwork at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Scientists often struggle to convey the meaning of their work to the general public. Cleveland says the approach of bringing in a journalist from the beginning helped his proposal stand out and get funding from the National Science Foundation in a highly competitive application process. It will allow him to focus on his research while at the same time helping to create better communication. “I’m never going to do as well at that as someone who’s an expert and a professional journalist,” he said.

The collaboration benefits both sides. For the School of Journalism, the opportunity to document all phases of the research will allow a student to produce compelling stories about a rigorous scientific experiment that has large potential impacts on humanity, said Associate Professor Henriette Lowisch, the UM J-School’s graduate program director, who collaborated with Cleveland on his proposal.

“This will be a huge challenge for an emerging journalist, who will be able to practice all they’ve learned about making complex research accessible to the public,” Lowisch said. “It’s an innovative model of collaboration between journalism and the sciences that we hope will serve as a model for other research efforts at the University of Montana.” Together, Lowisch and Cleveland will select a journalism graduate student to accompany the research team.

In Panama, Cleveland will be testing whether tropical plants are able to get more nutrients from the soil than scientists have previously thought. Tropical forests are among the most productive on Earth, and remove significant amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The plants use CO2 as food to grow, but their growth is ultimately limited by the presence of other nutrients, such as phosphorous, which is scarce in tropical soils. Cleveland’s NSF grant will allow him to study whether tropical plant species have evolved novel ways around this limitation.

The research not only questions conventional wisdom about what plants are capable of, it also carries implications for a world coming to terms with climate change. If Cleveland is right and tropical forests are able to match growing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere with phosphorous and other nutrients in the soil, they’ll act as better carbon sinks, which could help mitigate the effects of burning fossil fuels.

It’s a good story for an up-and-coming journalist, but how to cover it will be a choice the graduate student will make on the ground in Panama. The result will go beyond the traditional press release that tries to explain scientific research to the public, and instead use story, the craft of journalism, to showcase science.

Both Lowisch and Cleveland said that the project leaves the journalism student room to tell the story as he or she best sees fit.

“We’re just going to say here’s an opportunity, come do something,” Cleveland says. “Hopefully that benefits them and they can tell something interesting about what we’re doing, or maybe not. There’s no agenda.”

Lowisch said that part of the reason she is excited about doing this collaboration with Cleveland is exactly that understanding. “Both journalism and science are disciplines of verification, and to be able to do that you need to be independent and Cory Cleveland has understood that.”

Adapted from UM news release by Andrew Graham

October 1, 2015October 9, 2015 montanajournalism Feature, J-School, Student

From hunting stories to hunting fossils

Montana Hodges just brought a suitcase full of fossils back from Alaska and wears Tyrannosaurus Rex shaped earrings. This month she is the lead author of a paper in a geology journal about approximately 200 million year old coral reefs. Believe it or not it was journalism, a career singularly obsessed with the here and now, that brought her here.

Montana Hodges unpacks coral reef fossils after a recent trip to Alaska. Photo by Andrew Graham

Now, she’s pursing a degree in the University of Montana’s Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program (I.I.P.). As an undergraduate student at Sacramento State she double majored in journalism and geology. Afterwards Hodges entered the graduate program in Environmental Science and Natural Resource Journalism at the University of Montana. Right from the beginning, she knew she wanted to write about fossils for her Masters Project.

Her story, ‘Dinosaur Wars,’ would run on the cover of the August 19, 2013 issue of High Country News, a prestigious environmental news magazine out of Colorado. It described the conflict between for-profit fossil hunters and academic paleontologists. Hodges explored whether this conflict existed to the detriment of the science.

Hodges was nowhere near finished with fossils after receiving her Masters degree however, and decided to pursue an I.I.P. The article didn’t make her the most popular newcomer to the field. “There’s a lot of people in the paleontology community that don’t accept me,” she said.

She’s now studying mass extinctions; points in the Earth’s history where half or more of all living species have been wiped out. Her focus is on an extinction event which occurred around 2 million years ago, probably as a result of global climate change.

In particular, she is studying the massive die off, and eventual recovery, of coral reefs. Her new paper describes coral reef fossils found in Nevada, which was underwater 2 million years ago. They’re the earliest examples of coral’s recovery after the extinction.

Journalism has helped her with her new work Hodges thinks, particularly in her ability to write clear and succinct scientific papers. Though the writing is more technical, she says the foundation remains the same. Her reporting career has also helped. “I think journalists are trained to do excellent research,” she said.

Hodges hopes her current work with coral will eventually lead to a better understanding of the perils coral reefs face today. According to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, coral reefs face near extinction as a result of warming temperatures. There is a story of recovery too, says Hodges, and even though it’s a story predicting far into the future, it’s one she’s particularly well equipped to tell.

By Andrew Graham