UPDATE: This webinar is over, but check out the presentations and resources below!
Understanding the Body Burden:
Using Human Testing in Environmental and Health Storytelling
WHEN: June 19, 10 a.m. PST
WHERE: Your computer
It's not easy for journalists to undertake testing on humans, nor should it be. But testing for the body burden – the human body's levels of chemical pollutants that can cause cancer, birth defects and other problems – can add powerful context to health and environmental storytelling.
In this online briefing, you’ll hear from two veteran environmental health journalists, Janet Wilson and Douglas Fischer, on how they tested families, what obstacles they encountered and what they learned.
This Webinar is sponsored by Reporting on Health in collaboration with the Society of Environmental Journalists.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Janet Wilson is a veteran journalist and communications expert based in southern California. Wilson, recipient of a Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism grant, recently reported for California Watch on the body burdens faced by a family living in the polluted Southern Calif. community of Maywood. As an environment reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, she covered everything from inner city neighborhoods grappling with deadly soot and hexavalent chromium to White House officials quashing scientists' findings on ozone and climate change. Wilson was part of teams honored with 2008 First Place awards by the Associated Press and Los Angeles Press Club for wildfire coverage. She was a frontline reporter on the Times team that won the paper's 2004 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. She has also worked with grist.org, Environmental Health News, the Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, CNN, ABC News "Nightline" and Christian Science Monitor. She currently works with the program in public health and other researchers at the University Of California-Irvine.
Check out Janet's presentation:
Douglas Fischer is an award-winning journalist and editor of DailyClimate.org, a nonprofit, foundation-funded news service focusing on climate change. His groundbreaking, scientifically-based body burden reporting for the Oakland Tribune resulted in a peer-reviewed scientific journal article and earned an Award of Merit from the inaugural Grantham Prize, the world's largest journalism prize. Fischer has spent 16 years in journalism, including eight years covering the environment for the Oakland Tribune and five years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska. He started his career at Newsweek. His articles have won international recognition, most recently an Earth Journalism Award from Internews for his climate coverage. Fischer is a board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Check out Doug's presentation:
Body Burden Webinar: Douglas Fischer Presentation
MORE REPORTING RESOURCES:
Employing Human Testing to Tell Stories about Environmental Health Risk: More Tips from Janet Wilson
ABOUT THE SPONSORS
Reporting on Health is an online community for people passionate about fostering great health and medical coverage of our communities. ReportingonHealth provokes conversations about health journalism, blogging, and storytelling. It provides its members with a place to swap ideas, to showcase their work and to benefit from our reporting toolkits and tip-filled blogs. A project of USC Annenberg's California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, ReportingonHealth is funded by a generous grant from The California Endowment.
The Society of Environmental Journalists is the only North-American membership association of professional journalists dedicated to more and better coverage of environment-related issues. SEJ's mission is to strengthen the quality, reach and viability of journalism across all media to advance public understanding of environmental issues. SEJ provides critical support to journalists of all media in their efforts to cover complex issues of the environment responsibly.
Photo credit: Nick Lammers/Oakland Tribune
