There's a new kid in the www.reporter.org neighborhood: The Society of Environmental Journalists. SEJ moved to the IRE/NICAR server this fall as the first step in an ambitious upgrade for SEJ's online services.
As an SEJ board member and manager of its Web page, I'm excited about the move and the plans we have for new services to our members. Best of all, except as noted, all of the services we have are open to non-members as well.
We especially encourage Uplink readers and IRE members to take advantage of what we've been putting together. We hope to create a one-stop site for information about and Internet resources of use in environmental journalism. We're not quite to that point, but once we've settled into our new digs, the upgrades will be coming fast and furious.
More documents
The centerpiece is our Web page, at http://www.sej.org. Begun two years ago on space donated by the Tacoma (Wash.) News Tribune, our page has two types of resources. First, it has a rapidly growing collection of documents created by SEJ and related groups: Our quarterly SEJournal, with back issues to Spring 1995 and more being added steadily; the biweekly TipSheet, a guide to upcoming environmental news from SEJ, the National Safety Council's Environmental Health Center and the Radio and Television News Directors Association; and other publications. Our near-term plans include several new projects, such as "Frequently Asked Questions" files on environmental topics.
Pertinent hot links
Second, the SEJ Web page also contains a well-edited collection of links to other Internet sites that we believe are not just useful to environmental journalists, but also reliable. Some of these sites are featured in On the Internet on page six of this issue. Additional sites are added as they are brought to our attention. Our intent with these listings is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and focus on sites that either a) contain good, solid content, or b) have encyclopedic collections of links to other sites on the subject.
Search engine added
With our move to reporter.org we'll be adding one new feature that our members have requested many times: A search engine. Now, visitors to the Web page will be able to search by keyword for, say, an unfamiliar chemical that they have to write about on deadline, or a new subject - electromagnetic fields, for example - that they need to learn about in a hurry.
The Web page also contains information about how to join SEJ and regular updates on our national and regional conferences, many of which attract non-members as well. For example, on Sept. 7, we brought 80 people to Stanford University for an all-day conference on computer-assisted reporting and the Internet, an event co-organized by the Northern California Science Writers Association and sponsored in part by NICAR.
We've also posted frequent agenda updates for our 1996 national conference Oct. 17-20 in St. Louis, and as plans come together for our next national conference in Tucson Oct. 2-5, 1997, and the one after that in Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1998, we'll be posting updates on the Web site. The same is true for activities of our sister organization, the International Federation of Environmental Journalists. On the SEJ Web page, you'll find the IFEJ newsletter and a summary of plans for that group's annual conference in November in the Philippines.
New listservs
The Web page isn't the only thing we're doing at the sej.org domain. We're also creating several new listservs to supplement our existing, members-only list. At least one of these will be a general discussion list for environmental journalism, open to members and non-members alike. And in imitation of nicar.org, we also plan to create our own newsgroups for whatever purposes appropriate - looking for roommates at an upcoming conference, posting press releases and other announcements, and so forth.
We're grateful to NICAR for making room for us on its server, and to the Tacoma News Tribune for having given us a home during our formative period. We hope you'll visit the Web page at http://www.sej.org and let us know how you think it could be improved.