Ted Scripps Fellowship

Five Questions for the Fellows: RJ Sangosti

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 15:54:05 +0000

Five Questions for the Fellows: RJ Sangosti Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/13/2020 - 08:54

Andrew Cooper-Sansone

As part of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, award-winning journalists have been coming to CU Boulder for 21 years. Fellows embark on a year of courses, projects, field trips, seminars and more−taking advantage of everything university life has to offer. This series is a chance to get to know this year’s cohort of talented journalists beyond what a typical bio page will tell you.

RJ Sangosti has been a photojournalist at The Denver Post since 2004, where he’s covered events spanning from Hurricane Katrina to presidential elections. Over more than a decade, he has documented the people and landscape of eastern Colorado, where years of drought and a loss of agricultural earning power continue to hurt farmers. Most recently, he completed a story about a Denver neighborhood in one of the country’s most polluted urban zip codes, whose residents continue to be impacted by a huge interstate construction project.

His work was included in the 2012 Time Magazine top 10 photos of the year, and he was honored to be part of the 2016 jury for the centennial year of The Pulitzer Prizes.

RJ recently sat down with CEJ graduate research assistant, Andrew Cooper-Sansone, to talk about his work and life.

1. Why did you choose to cover environmental topics, and is there any memory that stands out as formative in your decision? 
Well, I have a 12-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, and they have a big part in that. My kids are a big influence on me, and they’re why I want to cover environmental issues.

As an example, my son’s fifth-grade classmates worked to get Styrofoam trays out of their lunchroom. They pitched ideas to the school board, to the administration, and finally, after working all year long, they got them removed. But by the next year, there was a new principal and administration, and the trays were back. 

It's just a good example to me of why environmental journalism is so important: Without somebody questioning and pointing out when things aren’t right, the environment is oftentimes going to be left out.

2. What do you think is the most important environmental story happening right now?
I'm interested in the effects that climate change has on water, especially drought situations in eastern Colorado. 

I'm particularly interested in rural issues and how the drought is slowly working to erase rural America. The work that I want to do is in areas where certain political views, which might include climate change denial, sometimes exist. It’s okay that people have different views, because that’s what makes this country great. But my job is to go into their neighborhoods, into those rural communities, and open some eyes, make them question their views and think differently about conservation. These kinds of environmental issues affect us all, including rural areas, and that's why it's so important. 

If we have less snowmelt, less water trickles down the rivers and streams into towns in eastern Colorado. A situation like this makes it hard for a farmer, who, for example, may have just paid $200,000 for a tractor and now needs to buy more land to farm to pay the bills, but the water to maintain the land is not there.

I'm a visual person, a photojournalist, so I'm showing the visual effects of the area’s water issues. I want to show situations like reservoirs that are no longer full, so people can no longer take water for irrigation out of them. People can no longer recreate there, so people are not coming into the area to support the economy.

Those issues exist, and they're huge issues for rural America. But I think that, a lot of times, environmental journalism is in a bubble, and we forget about rural issues. But they’re important, because once we get everybody involved in this, we’re going to start to see real change.

From Sangosti's 2019 Project, The Long Shadow. Annabel Rodriguez-Santos, 8, lies in bed after a long night of getting little sleep. Annabel had an asthma attack during the night. "There are some nights you don't even sleep because you are just watching over them," said Annabel's mother Nancy Santos. Both Annabel and her older sister have childhood asthma. The family lives in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, only a few blocks from the construction on the Central 70 project. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

3. What's the most surprising thing you've learned from being at CU or in the Boulder community since starting the fellowship?
The most surprising thing is willingness of all the professors, instructors, the staff to share their ideas and slow down with me. I'm highly dyslexic and have a really hard time reading, and I just have a totally visual brain. I've been amazed at how everybody has just asked: How can I help? Or, what do you need? It's been an amazing place for somebody who was really scared to come back to school and nervous about the opportunity to audit classes. It was just frightening to me. It's been a really smooth transition, and it's amazing how welcoming the environment has been.

I've learned in my career as a visual person to talk about my dyslexia a lot. I've had some success in my career, and when I do lectures or talk to fellow photojournalists, I realize that there's a lot of people like me out there, especially in the visual world of journalism.

I'm taking a geology class with Dr. Stephen Welters. He has spent the time to get to know who I am and the project I'm working on. And then, like two weeks later, he emailed me all these articles related to my project. He told me, don't worry about the class reading and don’t overload yourself with this, and let me know if there’s something you’re really interested in. It is things like this that have made my experience so great.

In this weird time where I'm doing everything on Zoom, it’s a little crazy for me doing everything online. I think that’s really difficult, especially for someone that never really sat down at a computer for more than 20 minutes at a time (just to transmit a couple photos and off to the next thing). Now I have some eight-hour days in front of a computer screen, which is definitely one downside.

4. What has been the most helpful part of the Scripps Fellowship so far?
I think it’s the seminars because I'm a visual learner. It's always good when somebody can give me a paint-by-numbers look at something – like: “Here's a graph and here's why it’s important.” Doug Kenney’s talk was a great example. He pointed out all these things and explained it to me visually. He does a really good job breaking things down. 

It's pretty amazing to be around all these really smart people and to get these opportunities. As a working journalist, I would do four or five stories a day, and didn’t have the opportunity to slow down and think. This program has allowed me to really slow down and think more deeply about the project I’m working on.

5. What do you like to do outside of journalism?
I'm a big fly fisherman. I love camping and hiking, and pretty much being a silly dad. My wife, Sarah, and I have amazing kids who are teaching us how to rock climb. Both of our kids are into gym climbing, but Sarah and I have never really climbed before. My oldest is 12, and he flies up those rocks and makes it look easy. Then I give it a try, and it's intimidating and hard. We are amazed by our kids’ ability to get us out into the world and try something new.

Sangosti's family camping at Lake Irwin in Crested Butte. Wife, Sarah Sangosti, left; daughter Belle, 9, center; and son Nick, 12, right.

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Scripps Fellowship unites journalists to investigate oil and gas risks

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 21:42:10 +0000

Scripps Fellowship unites journalists to investigate oil and gas risks Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/12/2019 - 14:42

Shannon Mullane

In February 2018, Jason Plautz, a Ted Scripps Fellow at the time, got a message from a local scientist. There was a spike in oil-and-gas-related carcinogens in the air above Boulder the same night of an explosion at an oil well site 40 miles away, the researcher said.

What started as one reporter with an intriguing data set soon snowballed into five Scripps fellows producing an in-depth investigation into the dangers of the oil and gas boom.

The investigation centered on an explosion that injured one worker at the Stromberger oil and gas well pad near Windsor, Colorado in December 2017. Officials said the event posed little threat to the public or environment. But in “The rising risks of the West’s latest gas boom,” reporters Plautz and Dan Glick, from the 2001 fellowship cohort, revealed a night full of “chaos on the verge of catastrophe.” The story was an eight-month reporting effort, and in the end, it was produced by the largest group of fellows to ever team up on one story.

In addition to Plautz and Glick, the team included Ted Wood, from the 2002 cohort, who created all of the original photography. When High Country News picked it up, two more fellows became involved: Brian Calvert, from the 2014 fellowship cohort and High Country News editor-in-chief; and Jonathan Thompson, from the 2012 cohort and a contributing editor for the magazine.

“I, on my own, could not have done a version of the story that turned out as good,” Plautz said.

Through their reporting, Plautz and Glick recreated a detailed play-by-play of the night, showing for the first time how dangerous the explosion really was. On that December night, 50-foot-high flames leaped into the sky. There were 350 homes within a mile of the site, and residents called authorities saying they heard a boom and felt their houses shake. Well-site workers scrambled to respond.

“If the crew hadn’t shut everything down, ‘it could’ve been like an atomic bomb going off,’” said Ernie Bouldin, one of the supervisors who was on site during the explosion, as quoted in the story.

Extraction Oil and Gas, the company that owns the well pad, conducted an investigation, but never identified a root cause. All it came up with was a hypothesis that the explosion could have been caused by leaking gas on site.

“One of the challenges to reporting on oil and gas is that the industry is, no matter what they say, largely self-regulated...They report what they want to report,” Glick said. “In this case, there’s this explosion, and we still don’t know what happened. And the company is the only one that did the investigation. And that’s just crazy.”

That’s just one of many challenges that Plautz and Glick faced while reporting on the story. When they couldn’t get access to information, they filed information requests with local, state and federal governments. Finding sources who were there the night of the explosion was next to impossible until they got a detailed incident report from a sheriff’s department.

But working in a team, and the Scripps Fellowship itself, helped, Plautz said. Both gave the reporters something that always seems to be in short supply for a journalist: time.

“There was a lot of labor-intensive and time-intensive stuff that was certainly made easier by not having a daily job,” he said. For example, he could attend more community meetings and spend more time delving through complex oil and gas information databases.

In addition to time, Plautz said the Ted Scripps Fellowship connected him to sources and a network of journalists around the country with different skill sets and specialties. Plautz got to know Glick through several CEJ events, particularly a field trip to Weld County focusing on oil and gas that was led by Glick and Ted Wood earlier in the year. He even met the scientist who sent him the data set, Detlev Helmig, through the fellowship.

As for the rest of the team, some connected directly through the fellowship, others just knew of each other through the ever-growing network of former fellows.

For Glick, this network is one of the benefits of the fellowship. He often reaches out to fellows when he’s reporting on their “turf” to get the lay of the land.

“We're all such stray cats in the journalism world these days, especially the freelancers,” Glick said. “It's just so nice to know that there is this network out there of people who are really knowledgeable and helpful.”

Photo by Ted Wood, The Story Group

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Five Questions for the Fellows: Hillary Rosner

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 05:19:56 +0000

Five Questions for the Fellows: Hillary Rosner Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/22/2019 - 22:19

Shannon Mullane

The CEJ Scripps Fellowship has been bringing award-winning environmental journalists to CU Boulder for 21 years. Fellows embark on a year of courses, projects, field trips, seminars and more — taking advantage everything university life has to offer. This five-part series features each of the talented journalists in this year's cohort, taking a closer look at what drives them as journalists and what they think about environmental journalism today.

Hillary Rosner is a freelance journalist and editor. She has traveled the world with her writing, from Borneo to Kenya to here, the American West. She is a two-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Award, even acting as speaker for this year’s AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award Lecture at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Her most recent project was published in the December issue of National Geographic and explores whether the world’s most in-demand vegetable oil — palm oil — can be sustainably harvested.

Why did you choose to cover environmental topics and is there any memory that stands out as formative in your decision?

I slowly became more interested in enviro topics as I was working for a variety of publications in NYC. There wasn’t one event, but I recall a growing desire to be out in a rainforest somewhere, reporting on the strange things that were happening to the natural world as a result of human activity. I remember sitting at my desk at the Village Voice reading the Yale School of Forestry course catalog. I briefly worked for a startup called Inside.com that covered the media industry, and I also recall sitting at my cramped desk there, thinking, “Why am I at Inside when I should be outside?”

What do you think is the most important environmental story happening today?

Climate change is the obvious answer. But just as important — and all the more important because of climate change — is land-use change. How we are converting forests to pastures and plantations and farm fields, paving over prairies, polluting waterways, fragmenting what little habitat remains for some species.

Where do you find inspiration for the stories you tell?

People! I’m often inspired by the scientists and conservation professionals I meet who are champions of a particular place or species. Without champions, we are nowhere. One of my favorite stories I’ve done involved a couple of scientists getting toward the end of their careers. They had spent decades working to save an endangered fish that was worse off than when they started. But they refused to give up — or to give up hope.

What are your favorite things to do outside of journalism?

Inspired by the freedom the fellowship provided me, I recently started taking piano lessons. I took lessons as a kid but stopped when I was like 11, and for years I’ve been wanting to take it up again but never have the time. I’m loving it. Beyond that, I like to hike, do yoga, and spend time with my husband, son, and dogs. And travel in our camper van! Oh, and ski. Alpine and Nordic. Yay winter!

What is one rule or strategy of environmental reporting you find particularly important?

Make sure to recharge. Reporting on the environment can get seriously depressing, particularly in these dark times. I was feeling really down last summer, thinking about how much worse off the planet seems now than it did when I began writing about this stuff a decade and a half ago, and a Canadian journalist I met reminded me of the importance of bearing witness. That helped inspire me to keep going. It’s important to document what’s going on. Even if it’s just for posterity.

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