Dot Earth Blog: On Pipelines, Pulitzers and Independent Online Journalism

I encourage you to take a few minutes to watch and weigh in on the illuminating online chat I had yesterday with Inside Climate News publisher David Sassoon, editor Susan White and reporter Lisa Song.

We explored the comprehensive series of articles on environmental risks from America?s fast-growing maze of oil pipelines that earned the tiny, foundation-supported Web site the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday.

This is the third online news outlet to win a Pulitzer (one prize for Huffington Post and two for Pro Publica). There?ll surely be more.

In our Google+ Hangout, we talk about the site?s reporting package, which charted the causes, impacts and significance of a million-gallon spill of diluted bitumen in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010 but expanded to look at the outdated rules for pipeline monitoring and safety. Bitumen is the very crude oil extracted from Canada?s enormous deposits of oil sands. Early on, Inside Climate News began using the shorthand ?dilbit? for this substance and the name is catching on, including in the title of the new e-book consolidating the reporting ? ?The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You?ve Never Heard Of.?

One of my questions:

Is the solution to ban pipelines or to have more rigorous oversight?

Susan White replied:

The idea that we?re building pipelines using rules and regulations that are out of date is appalling. Forget whether you want pipelines or you want Canadian crude oil. That?s a separate debate?. More than 10,000 miles of new or repurposed pipelines are planned for the United States in the next few years. Why aren?t we making sure that they?re safer?

I noted that it appeared to me that prominent environmental groups don?t want to discuss safer pipelines:

As soon as you say you want to make it safer you?re basically saying it?s okay.

Sassoon said this dynamic exists, and shifted the chat toward the pipeline of the moment, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline extension that would allow more Canadian oil to flow to American refineries:

We don?t have an energy and climate policy in this country. So Keystone is the fulcrum around which that discussion is happening, even though it?s not a particularly deep discussion.

He called for President Obama to hit the ?pause? button, given the big environmental stakes and implications for climate change. [Please have a look back at Sassoon's 2012 Op-Ed article for The Times, "Crude, Dirty and Dangerous," for more.]

Lisa Song described the technologies that are available, at a cost, to improve pipeline reliability and safety. The final piece in the Pulitzer submission noted that the Keystone plan doesn?t include advanced spill-protection technology.

Then we shifted into a discussion of the financial model for Inside Climate ? which was launched with grants from the Energy Foundation, Grantham Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other philanthropies ? and mused on whether this kind of media outlet can be sustained and replicated.

White, in part, said:

I think the ones that survive and prosper will be the ones that focus on what we try to focus on ? following the basic core tenets of good journalism and building that trust over time.

There?s much more.

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/pipelines-pulitzers-and-independent-online-journalism/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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