{ "id": "1998-july-spreading-hazards-toxic-two-time", "slug": "1998-july-spreading-hazards-toxic-two-time", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-july-spreading-hazards-toxic-two-time.html", "year": 1998, "month": "July", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "SPREADING HAZARDS Toxic two-time", "kicker": "", "author_name": "Duff Wilson", "author_title": "Investigative Reporter", "affiliation": "The Seattle Times", "summary": "An investigative journalist describes how digital distribution via email and the Web amplified her Pulitzer Prize finalist series on toxic waste contamination in fertilizer, allowing the story to gain national attention and prompt regulatory reforms despite initial publication in a remote regional newspaper.", "keywords": [ "investigation", "toxins", "digital" ], "topics": [ "Health & Environment", "Investigative Methods", "Journalism & Newsroom" ], "technologies": [ "Microsoft Outlook Express 4.0", "World Wide Web", "Email", "spreadsheet" ], "full_text": "It was the revolution in e-mail and World Wide Web publishing-more than the newsprint of The Seattle Times or wires of Associated Press that gave sufficient power and reach to my series of articles on toxic wastes to be named a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.\n\nWhile I wrote \"Fear in the Fields - How hazardous wastes become fertilizer,\" it could easily have been ignored in the rest of America. After all, the story ran in a remote, rainy corner of the country during the July 4th weekend. It lacked the immediate national media follow-up that has attended more obvious environmental problems.\n\nHeavy industries were saving millions by disposing of hazardous wastes as fertilizer instead of putting them in a landfill or recycling them in a safer manner.\n\nMetal smelters, pulp and paper mills, cement kilns and their allied fertilizer companies would advertise the minor plant foods zinc, iron and lime in their wastes. But they wouldn't tell the ultimate buyers about the arsenic, cadmium, lead or dioxins. Nobody was regulating, testing or disclosing the tag-along toxics. Nobody knew what level was safe. Some experts said the metals build up in soil, plants and animals. Industry controlled the research. Industries were shifting the risk from their wastes onto farmers and gardeners. The industries saved $100 per ton. The unknowing farmers might save dimes per acre. When the mayor of Quincy, Wash., raised questions, the local industry tried to force her to shut up.\n\nBeyond newsprint\n\nBut instead of fading in the drizzle or sinking in Puget Sound, the story kept growing, and growing, spreading by bits, bytes and word of mouth.\n\nThanks to e-mail and the Web (and of course my editor and publisher), the story gained national and foreign attention and, finally, prompted significant reforms in laws, public understanding and industry practice.\n\nLike any self-respecting investigative project nowadays, \"Fear in the Fields\" was documented with help from spreadsheets, a database, the Web and e-mail. More importantly, it gained credibility and impact from what would have to be termed computerized, Web-based, informal publishing strategies following the newsprint version of the story.\n\nStarting from the end: Every time I wrote a follow-up article, sent it by e-mail to 100-200 experts and activists on every side of the issue.\n\nI kept a contact list in Microsoft Outlook Express 4.0 Address Book. This is a fully searchable mini-database that some people say is as good as Eudora Pro for e-mail, and it's free. Outlook Express makes it easy to build groups of people in e-mail lists. Often these experts and activists would get the article in e-mail before they could buy it in the newsstand. I asked these people if the articles were completely fair, accurate and complete - a practice I have previously done by telephone. Knowing you're going to initiate contact with your targets and sources with this question does wonders to make you careful to be fair, accurate and complete.\n\nThe cover note on the e-mail would summarize the new article in a sentence, provide a link to the article, ask for feedback and follow-up ideas, and provide links to source materials.\n\nElectronic contacts\n\nThis added credibility. It also meant the insiders' first response came directly back to me. So I knew the buzz inside industry and government. I harvested the follow-up suggestions. I knew whether any questions were being raised and, in one case, corrected a minor error before the final deadline. The Associated Press and Knight Ridder wire picked up on parts of \"Fear in the Fields,\" but this e-mail list extended the immediate distribution to 20 other states and five foreign countries. It pushed the articles to the desktops of scientists, industry officials, environmental activists, trade journals and government policy makers. They could always look for more information on the Web, too. Our site (http://www.seattletimes.com) linked all the articles from a Special Projects area that got more than 1,000 hits a day for weeks. We did not have time to put source documents on our Web site in Adobe Acrobat format. I wish we had. It adds credibility. It adds punch. The Miami Herald's \"Collars for Dollars\" is a model.\n\nPost-publication tips\n\nThese were some other uses of the computer after publication: \"Fear in the Fields\" generated more comments (most positive) than anything else we've done, with more than 200 e-mails, 100 phone calls, and 15,000 reprints. I sent a mass e-mail to about 100 of those people reporting on the actions that followed the articles.\n\nI published tip sheets for journalists in other states who would like to undertake similar investigations: http://www.seanet.com/~duff/ire/handouts.htm\n\nToward the end of my reporting, I used AskSam, a free text database program, to organize more than 50 *.doc files, 20 .txt files and 300 e-mails in my PC. AskSam lets you search for a word or phrase in different types of documents and returns a list of the hits.\n\nHidden in plain sight\n\nBack at the beginning: When I heard the incredible claim that manufacturing industries were disposing of toxic wastes by turning them into fertilizers, the first thing I did was to go online.\n\nI typed \"fertilizer\" and \"toxic\" in Yahoo, Alta Vista and Hotbot search engines. Nothing came up.\n\nLater I found other, probably better search engines - Northern Lights and Inference and other Web sites where those two words were discussed together. I found hazardous waste recyclers, conferences on recycling waste to fertilizer, and even the \"Industrial Materials Exchange\" that serves as a kind of blind-dating service between generators and recyclers. All hidden in plain sight - on the Web.\n\nAnd I discovered Medline (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/), which gets my vote for the best site on the Web. Thank you, Al Gore, for making this free. Medline lets you search 9 million medical and scientific studies.\n\nOne of the key breaks in my investigation was the discovery of a company, on its Web site, blasting its competitors' fertilizer products for being recycled from hazardous wastes without having cleaned up the toxic lead and cadmium (http://www.cozinco.com/).\n\nAnother break was the discovery of Australian and European Web sites where researchers talk about the risks of cadmium in fertilizer.\n\nAuthority granted\n\nAs the work went on, I kept a spreadsheet of fertilizer test results in Excel, sortable by column headings such as cadmium or manufacturer name.\n\nThis enabled me to say more than 100 fertilizer products whose analytical results were obtained by The Seattle Times higher amounts of lead than the average farm soil.\n\nI could also say, with authority, that recycled hazardous-waste fertilizer products contain higher amounts of lead and cadmium than the other products on the market. I was happy to share this spreadsheet with anyone who wanted it.\n\nI used e-mail to file public record requests, troll for experts in farm-related and medical discussion groups, and correspond with dozens of experts, farm families and fertilizer manufacturers. To some people, e-mail is a less threatening way to answer questions. They are careful in their responses - given a sensitive topic, that is fine with me.\n\nI also grabbed all the e-mail of one state official who was in the center of the practice. I used the state public records law that makes it clear electronic records are to be treated the same as paper records.\n\nPeople like to say computer-assisted reporting doesn't take the place of old-fashioned boot leather. Now isn't that a cowpie? Naturally I pounded a lot of pavement, corridors and dusty farm fields in my months of reporting. But the Internet pulled the whole world to the undersized computer monitor in my overcrowded cubicle in a dark corner of the newsroom.\n\nCome to think of it, maybe I should have spent more time on the farm. Things slow down there, but you get a lot more sunshine and fresh air.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "1991-may-transporting-toxics-through-california", "score": 0.204 }, { "slug": "1996-may-pulitzer-finalist-for-national-reporting-military-secrets", "score": 0.16 }, { "slug": "1991-march-hartfords-toxic-front-page", "score": 0.144 }, { "slug": "1997-may-probing-hud-woes", "score": 0.132 }, { "slug": "1998-may-pulitzer-profiles", "score": 0.129 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-july-spreading-hazards-toxic-two-time.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1998-july-spreading-hazards-toxic-two-time.json" }