Acknowledgments

IJNR is grateful to many people for encouraging and supporting the effort to create this report.

No one has been more encouraging than Michael Fischer, the imaginative and dedicated program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He inspired the work. He believed in the importance of this undertaking from the start–and through its many bumps and snares along the way. Grants from the Hewlett Foundation, arranged with Mr. Fischer's guidance, good will and abundant patience, have carried us to the completion of our task.

We also appreciate the support of the Fred Gellert Family Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the University of Maryland's Merrill College of Journalism.

We wish to acknowledge the many librarians, journalists, newsroom managers and newspaper
owners who cooperated with our inquiries, sent us copies of their dailies and gave so generously of their personal time.

In addition, we are indebted to hundreds of other Westerners and many other people who share a deep concern for the future of the North American West. These ranchers and farmers, foresters and fishers and miners, scientists and regulators, historians and land stewards gave us their candid assessments of how things are and how things ought to be. They helped us to recognize issues and patterns that we otherwise would have overlooked.

Among the people who worked hard to pull together this report, three individuals have distinguished themselves with stamina, concentration, thoroughness, resourcefulness, good-natured humor and remarkable fairness. They are Lisa Kerscher, Chris Bryant and Jennifer Savage. All three have extensive experiences in the West and solid backgrounds in journalism. Without them, there would be no report. These three have been the soul of our research team. They have toiled for many months in The Readatorium, studying all 285 daily newspapers of the West, gathering essential information, checking facts, questioning generalizations and shaping the assessments of newsroom performance.

Also contributing to the analysis of these newspapers were Sally Brown, Alex Dunn, Julie Kightlinger and Seth Quackenbush. We are thankful for their efforts.

And we appreciate the careful work done by Brock Elam Design of Stevensville, Montana, creator of the maps that appear on the title page and throughout the Geographies chapter of the report.

Finally, we wish to express special thanks to the veteran reporters who ventured out across the North American West to observe conditions and to interview many people in person for this report. At the time they undertook those indispensable reporting assignments, all were independent journalists. Two of them have since taken jobs in Western news organizations. These journalists include Ross Anderson, William Dietrich, Mary Hager and Helen Jung.

Frank Edward Allen
Editor

Missoula, Montana
August 2003

About the Authors

Frank Edward Allen, principal author and editor
Mr. Allen is a former environment editor and bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, where he spent most of his three-decade journalism career. He also has reported and edited economic, corporate, public policy and environment news for daily newspapers and news-wire services in Eugene, Portland, Tucson and Minneapolis. For three years, he was dean of the University of Montana’s School of Journalism, where he carried a full teaching load and spent summers conducting expedition–style programs for mid-career reporters and editors that grew to become IJNR. Mr. Allen has taught journalism at the University of Maryland, where he helped establish the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. He has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Stanford University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. He lives near Missoula, Montana, where he serves as president and executive director of IJNR.

William Dietrich, reporter and writer
Mr. Dietrich has worked for nearly 30 years as a daily-newspaper reporter and an author. His newspaper assignments have ranged from coverage of Congress to the eruption of Mount St. Helens. He was one of four reporters at The Seattle Times who were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. His travels as a journalist have taken him throughout the West and around the world, to Alaska’s Arctic and to the South Pole. He has reported from aircraft carriers, a Trident submarine and a B-52 bomber, as well as from inside of an igloo, an Indian sweat lodge, a nuclear bomb crater and a mile-deep mine. He is the author of two award-winning non-fiction books on environment issues, The Final Forest and Northwest Passage. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Western Washington University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a fellow at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. Mr. Dietrich worked on this report as an independent journalist. He has since undertaken a part-time writing assignment for the Sunday magazine of The Seattle Times. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.

Ross Anderson, reporter
Mr. Anderson is a former senior reporter of The Seattle Times, where he provided regional perspectives on science, public policy and environment issues for 30 years. Among his many journalism awards is a 1990 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, which he shared with three other reporters for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1997, he won a national first-place award from the Association of Opinion Page Editors for editorial commentary on Columbia River salmon. He also has reported extensively on the Pacific Norwest’s marine mammals, sewage-treatment problems, pulp mills, air pollution and recurring conflicts between economies and ecosystems. Mr. Anderson studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for an academic year while earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from Whitworth College.

Mary Hager, reporter
Ms. Hager is a former correspondent and contributing editor for Newsweek, where she spent more than 20 years covering issues of science, medicine, Western public lands and the environment. During that period, she helped the magazine win numerous awards, including the 1992 National Environmental Development Association Award for balance in journalism and a 1990 National Press Club award for an article entitled, “How Safe Is Your Food?” Her cover story about Prozac for Newsweek in 1990 won an award for best national news magazine reporting from the Southern California Psychiatric Society. Earlier in her career, Ms. Hager was a reporter and editor for Life magazine and the Palo Alto Times in California. She has a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and a master’s degree from Stanford University. She also has been a Sloan-Rockefeller Fellow in advanced science writing at Columbia University and a Heinz International Fellow in Environmental Journalism. Ms. Hager currently serves as a trustee and treasurer of IJNR. She lives in McLean, Virginia.

Helen Jung, reporter
Ms. Jung has been a staff writer for Northwest Edition of The Wall Street Journal, a technology reporter and business columnist for The Seattle Times and a business reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. She has broad experience in covering natural resources and economic development in the West. In Alaska, she won several awards for business reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists for her coverage of the commercial fishing industry, the state’s largest private-sector employer. Ms. Jung was “between engagements” when she worked on this report. She has since joined the Seattle bureau of The Associated Press as a business writer. She has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Christopher Bryant, researcher and reporter
Before joining IJNR in 2001, Mr. Bryant directed mineral exploration crews in Mexico, Africa, Indonesia, the American West and the Canadian Arctic. He has also taken part in field experiments in several Western states and the Galapagos Islands as a geophysical technician, deploying and maintaining seismology equipment. Mr. Bryant has a bachelor’s degree in geological sciences and a master’s degree in journalism, both from the University of Oregon. He interned at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco and has written articles for Sierra magazine. Mr. Bryant, a sixth-generation Oregonian, now lives in Missoula, Montana.

Lisa Kerscher, researcher and graphic artist
Ms. Kerscher, who goes by the nickname “Kersch,” has been a freelance print and online media producer since 1998, specializing in science, technology and environment topics. She joined IJNR in 2001. She also has been a staff writer for Learners Online, Inc., an electronic-media service for teachers. Most of her articles are distributed to Newspapers in Education programs at numerous dailies, including The Denver Post, The Sacramento Bee and The Salt Lake Tribune. Ms. Kerscher also has worked for the Missoulian, the International Wildlife Film Festival & Media Center, the Montana Natural History Center and the U.S. Forest Service. She has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology and a master’s degree in journalism, both from the University of Montana. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Jennifer Savage, researcher and designer
Ms. Savage has worked as a reporter and copy editor at four daily newspapers in North and South Carolina. She left the South to attend graduate school at the University of Oregon where she earned a master’s degree in journalism and helped teach classes in newspaper design, copy editing and writing for the media. Ms. Savage has also worked for the last five years as a freelance writer, designer and book editor. Her travel and work experiences in the West led her to IJNR in 2001. She now lives on a farm near Arlee, Montana.