About This Project
ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT/NEWS21 AT THE MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
No one voted on it. But the combined crises of skyrocketing oil prices and global warming gave a sudden rush of support for the first nuclear energy push in 30 years. McCain promises 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Obama is more cautious but says nuclear must be part of any energy independence mix. It’s just one of the surprises as presidential politics shifts focus to energy and the environment -- issues tackled by the Carnegie-Knight fellows at Medill for News21. What's at stake is America’s way of life that takes for granted affordable and plentiful energy, water and food. What's at stake is a beautiful blue planet.
Medill’s News21 reporters visited Alaska, where life is rapidly changing as global warming melts the ice and Governor Sarah Palin, the new GOP candidate for vice president, heats up the political landscape. Reporters explored the Tennessee Valley Authority, a prism to the past and future of government impact on energy choices. They toured coastal states where civil defense plans look for ways to cope with rising ocean levels. They added up the water resources that often mask the strategic hidden cost of energy production. They discovered the frontlines of grassroots political battles over coal mining that blasts mountaintops and megadairies that threaten groundwater supplies with contamination. And they found the boom towns of old energy and the bright new capitals of solar and wind.
This fall, four reporters continued Medill’s News21 coverage, exploring the influence of the environment and energy independence on the presidential debates and the election itself. A corps of additional reporters contributed to election night blogs and other coverage as more than 150,000 people flooded Chicago’s Grant Park with hope, joy and a rollicking good party for President-elect Barack Obama. Our enviroVOTE meter and story followed the election results in nearly 500 other races to show a 19 percent increase in eco-friendly lawmakers elected. As Obama’s new administration takes hold with plans to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, News21 tracked the national security, research and energy impacts of climate change.
The Carnegie and Knight Foundations gave our 11 summer fellows and four fall reporters the opportunity to explore the future of journalism by taking these stories in innovative directions. Medill's News21 reporters paired in-depth, watchdog journalism with story packages that give you compelling reporting, visual drama, varied media and plenty of interactive choices for following the stories. We are grateful for the support of Carnegie-Knight for new forums in journalism through this initiative.
Many thanks to News21 coordinator Robert Calo for his support and to technical wizards Brian Kennedy and Milan Andric for their expert assistance with the News21 content management systems. At Medill, thanks to Jeff Prah and Ivan Meyers for technical guidance. And special thanks to people from all over the country who opened their lives and shared their stories with us.
Meet our News21 reporters, faculty and staff.
Biographies of News21 Fellows and Reporters
Brian Boyer
Brian Boyer is a programmer coaxed by a scholarship into studying journalism at Medill. He participated in the News21 coverage of the election, helping to create the enviroVOTE interactive project. You can find him on http://sixthw.com/.
Frank Carlson
Born and raised in Knoxville, Tenn., Frank came to Medill from Beijing, where he spent two years teaching English, studying Mandarin and traveling throughout the Middle Kingdom. Before moving to Asia, he graduated from the University of Richmond with degrees in English and Spanish, and he's spent considerable time volunteering and traveling in Central and South America.
At Medill Frank covers business, energy and environmental issues. He hopes to soon return to the developing world as a writer, photographer and producer for magazine, radio and documentary film. He will complete his degree this fall in Washington, D.C.
For News21 Frank wrote the story and took the photographs for the piece on TVA, and he edited and produced the videos for the flash component. Frank wrote, filmed and produced the "Street Peeps" video, and he conducted the interview and produced the video for the "Pennies from (a Polluted) Heaven." He contributed reporting and photographs to the "Green Voter's Guide to 2008 Presidential Election."
Thanks to the people at the Tennessee Valley Authority for providing the historical photographs and their time. Also, thanks to Phil Taylor and Carmen Cantrell for the two photographs of surface mining from Wise County, Va, both used in the coal video in "TVA."
Special thanks to Eric Ferkenhoff, Abigail Foerstner, Cynthia Linton, Bill Hammock and Milan Andric for all their help.
Kahrin Deines
Kahrin Deines will complete Medill's graduate program in journalism in December 2008. Originally from Alaska, she is a writer who spent many years adventuring in the "lower 48" before deciding to become a journalist. Kahrin graduated from the University of Illinois in Chicago with a Bachelor's in History in 2005. As a News21 fellow who pursued advanced environmental reporting this fall, she explored stories on the Climate Change threat and on efforts to mitigate the damage.
Dori Glanz
Dori Glanz is a second year Masters in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and is focusing on political communication, health, and energy policy.
Originally from Austin, she went to Southwestern University where she studied Political Science and French. She also studied at L'Institut Catholique in Paris. Upon graduation, Dori worked at the Texas Capitol for State Representative Mark Strama (D-Austin). There, she wrote and advocated for legislation on a wide array of topics including women's health, renewable energy, and law enforcement.
Dori currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Harvard Kennedy School Review and writes for the Kennedy School Democrats Blog.
Ryan Graff
Ryan Graff held a variety of newsroom positions – from arts and entertainment editor to business reporter – at small papers in Colorado before starting his own freelance business two years ago, which included some time in a travelling carnival, on an offshore oilrig and in a New Orleans flophouse. He has been published in the Rocky Mountain News, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Canoe and Kayak and other publications. He has loved learning about every aspect of new media and magazine journalism at Medill and with News21. Ryan can't wait to start a new, though yet-to-be-determined, entrepreneurial project after he finishes school.
Eric Kroh
Eric Kroh is a Chicago-based print and multimedia journalist. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and his work has appeared in newspapers and magazines nationwide. He is a 2008 Carnegie-Knight Journalism Fellow.
Ryan Mark
Ryan is attending Medill on a scholarship provided by a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant. While at Medill he has reported on science and technology, and worked on interactive reporting projects. Prior to starting graduate studies, he was lead developer and technology director at ZapTel.com, an award winning consumer telecommunications services company. ZapTel is an Inc500 company and was named one of the 'Top 10 Smartest Small Businesses' by PC Magazine in October 2007. Ryan blogs occasionally at ryan-mark.com.
Angela Nitzke
Angela Nitzke is studying for a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism. After graduating with a degree in biology from Denison University, Angela worked as a research technician in neurobiology and psychiatry laboratories at both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Angela further pursued her interest in behavioral and environmental aspects of biology by serving as an intern at the Lincoln Park Zoo's Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. Angela is looking forward to a career as a science writer.
Erica Peterson
Erica Peterson will complete her master’s degree in journalism in December 2008 from the Medill School of Journalism. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Carleton College in 2006, where she was also the editor-in-chief of the college’s student-run weekly newspaper.
At Medill, she has focused on science and health reporting and writing. Almost immediately after graduation, she’ll be moving to Charleston, W.Va. to begin work as a Public Affairs Reporter and Producer for West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Rob Runyan
Rob Runyan is a government and public policy reporter who works across all media platforms. He is from a small suburb north of Detroit, Mich. He attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School before attending Denison University in Granville, Ohio. In college, Rob worked on all sections of The Denisonian, the campus newspaper, before becoming managing editor his junior year. He found his love for politics in the summer of 2004 when he interned at the Army News Service at the Pentagon. After four years in Ohio--and one semester in Barcelona--Rob graduated magna cum laude with a degree in communication.
After graduation, he served for a year as an alumni volunteer teacher and coach at his high school, while also moderating the student newspaper. Rob has covered several beats including housing, legal issues and, most recently, energy policy in his time at Medill. He has also discovered a zest and talent for multimedia reporting, which he hopes to apply to his future reporting after he receives his MSJ from Medill in December 2008.
For News21 Rob wrote and produced Watergy: Faucets and Fuel Battle for Water and Candidates Calling All Car Makers to Fuel Efficient Future. He also contributed reporting to Green Voter's Guide to 2008 Presidential Election and photographs to Pennies from (a Polluted) Heaven. A special thanks to Alissa Swango and Richard Alvarez for their creative input and technical support on the “Watergy” flash presentation.
Rupa Shenoy
Rupa Shenoy has been twice chosen as the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Minority Fellow in Urban Journalism. As a fellow, she was an investigative reporter at The Chicago Reporter for three years. There, she broke a story showing that the Chicago Police Department failed for 10 years to publish reports on the number of officers who are accused of abusing civilians. She won the Chicago Headline Club's Peter J. Lisagor Award for an investigation of the discrepancies between recidivism rates of black and Latino ex-offenders.
Shenoy went on to work as a staff reporter at The Daily Herald, the third largest newspaper in Illinois. At the Herald, she wrote a series of investigative articles showing that the federal Environmental Protection Agency knew about possible cancer-causing radioactive material buried under a suburban neighborhood but didn't inform residents or take action. The stories forced a cleanup. In January, Shenoy joined Medill, where she is training to tell investigative stories through print, the Internet and broadcast formats.
Philip Taylor
Phil Taylor is a graduate student and aspiring foreign correspondent at the Medill School of Journalism. He studied journalism and comparative religion at Kalamazoo College and was the Voynovich scholarship winner.
While working on an archaeological excavation in the northern Galilee, Taylor’s excavation team was in range of rocket fire during the Israel and Hezbollah war. This experience became his first news assignment, a feature commentary on wartime kibbutz life that he sent from an internet café to the News-Sentinel, his hometown newspaper in Fort Wayne, Ind. Taylor worked two internships at the Sentinel before beginning classes at Medill. In his first experience in environmental reporting, he covered local pollution control and environmental regulation. Like Hillary Clinton, Taylor is still “agnostic” on nuclear energy and hopes to make it the focal point of his work for News21.
Kayla Webley
Kayla Webley is a graduate student studying new media at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where she has become proficient in Adobe Flash; Web design and production; and photo, audio and video reporting and editing. She has reported and produced an audio documentary that aired on Chicago Public Radio, created layouts for several media, learned how to create and produce multimedia packages and studied interactive storytelling.
Kayla studied journalism and political science at the University of Washington in Seattle. As editor-in-chief of her college newspaper, she was awarded a national Mark of Excellence Award for feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. Her internships include The Portland Oregonian, The Seattle Times, The Scripps Howard News Wire and National Public Radio. Her work has also has been published by Vocalo Radio, The Huffington Post, The Rocky Mountain News, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Arizona Daily Star, The Ventura County Star, and HGTV Ideas Magazine. She is also the editor-in-chief of The Windy Citizen.
For News21 Kayla reported and contributed to the "TVA: Ghost of America's Energy Past; Model for its Energy Future?" story, and produced and designed the flash multimedia presentation. She also produced and designed the "Meet Pickens’ World Wind Capital" flash multimedia presentation, and assisted with the production of the "Green Voter's Guide to the 2008 Presidential Race."
A special thanks to Richard Alvarez for his assistance with flash.
Lauren Williamson
Lauren Williamson completed her master's degree in journalism in June from the Medill School of Journalism. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in communication from Northwestern, where she majored in performance studies. Her undergraduate program culminated with a one-person show based on the life and work of Yoko Ono, which Lauren wrote, directed and performed. After college, Lauren worked for five years as Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Northwestern, where she supervised the campus tour program and specialized in music admissions.
During her studies at Medill, Lauren held an internship at Schuba's, a Chicago music venue. Through the internship, she interviewed bands who performed there for Schuba’s Web site and video archive. She has freelanced for Skin Inc. magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times. She looks forward to reporting and writing for a daily print publication after completing News21.
Biographies of News21 Editors
Richard Alvarez, Media Advisor
Richard is an evangelist for design and development, and his background in writing, interactive development, and teaching are equally served. Since 1991, he's been involved in all phases of interactive, from front-end authoring, to back-end dynamic scripting and site architecture. Richard's award-winning development with Flash led to his first book published by New Riders, Generator/Flash Web Development: Workflow Process From Planning to Production. Richard serves on the New Media Faculty at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He also helps run Method Engine, a full service interactive boutique agency that offers a potent combination of strategy, design and development.
Janice Castro, Coordinator
Janice Castro, News 21 Coordinator for Medill, is Medill's senior director, graduate education and teaching excellence, and an assistant professor of journalism. Prior to joining Northwestern in 2000, Castro was a reporter, writer and editor for Time Magazine for more than 20 years. She was a launch editor for Discover and several other Time Inc. start-ups. The author of Time cover stories and special reports on politics, health care, media business, women in business and arts and entertainment, she also contributed to Time special issues on every presidential election from 1976 through 1996. As Time's senior health care correspondent, she covered the Clinton health care reform process and authored The American Way of Health (Little, Brown 1994). She has written for numerous magazines in the news, media, science and entertainment fields.
Castro headed Time's interactive operations for five years and was responsible for online news and community for Time Inc. magazines including People, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated and Money. She supervised the design and launch of Time's news services for CompuServe, Pointcast and Microsoft, directed teams that launched online sites for Time for Kids, Time Asia, Time Europe, Time Digital, Time/CNN AllPolitics.com and TIME-AOL news. Her online teams won numerous national awards for editorial excellence, including honors from the Society for News Design, the White House Press Photographers Association and Editor & Publisher. Castro managed editorial partnerships for Time Inc. with The Associated Press, Reuters, America Online, Yahoo!, Apple, Microsoft and others, and represented Time Warner at the White House Summit on Child Safety and the Internet in 1998. In 1999, she was launch editorial director for Britannica.com, a top 100 site. A founding officer of the Online News Association, Castro also has served as director and first vice president of the Overseas Press Club of America, adviser to Consumers Union's Consumer WebWatch (and co-author of the WebWatch Credibility Guidelines) and a director of the Women's Media Group in New York. She is co-chair of the Inland Press Association's board committee on Digital Media.
At Medill, Castro teaches new media, media management, magazine publishing and reporting. She has served as a research fellow at Northwestern's Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, headed Northwestern's Study Abroad faculty committee and serves as a fellow in Northwestern's Residential College system. She's a graduate of National Louis University and Kellogg's Advanced Executive Program.
Eric Ferkenhoff, Managing Editor
Eric Ferkenhoff is the happy husband of Evelyne and the father of two young sons. He lives near Northwestern's Evanston campus, where he has taught as an adjunct and full-time faculty member since 2005. Prior to joining Norhtwestern, Ferkenhoff worked for six years at the Chicago Tribune before starting a free-lance life that has included working as a Chicago-based correspondent for the Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and the New York Times. Ferkenhoff, who moved to Chicago from Kansas City, his hometown, in 1993, got his start in journalism doing scattered freelance work and working for the City News Bureau of Chicago. Ferkenhoff, 38, is an editor with the Northwestern News21 project.
Abigail Foerstner
Foerstner teaches science and environmental reporting at Medill and is part of a curriculum team developing a widely expanded health, sciences and environmental journalism program for undergraduate and graduate students. Her recently published book, James Van Allen: The First Eight Billion Miles, explores the life of a space pioneer and driving force behind America's satellites, probes and science that have remapped the solar system. Foerstner's previous book, Picturing Utopia, offers a rare look at a 19th century religious utopia through private collections of glass plate negatives that she helped recover and preserve. She writes biographical essays for art books and writes art reviews. She covered science and the environment as a reporter for nearly 10 years for the suburban sections of the Chicago Tribune and has written hundreds of articles on the arts, science, health and other topics for the Tribune and other publications. Foerstner grew up in Chicago and holds a BSJ and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism. She is married to photographer Arthur A. Caudy and has four children.
William Hammack, Media Advisor
Bill reports regularly on technology for public radio. Based at WILL-AM 580 in Urbana, Illinois, he's been a regular commentator for American Public Media's premier business show Marketplace, for Illinois Public Radio, and for Radio National Australia's Science Show. Many journalism, scientific and engineering organizations have recognized his work. He's received the top awards in science journalism: The National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award, the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, and the American Chemical Society's Grady-Stack Medal. He is currently a Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana. He recently spent a year as a U.S. Diplomat; as a Senior Science Adviser at the Department of State he worked on the Six Party Talks to remove nuclear materials and technology from North Korea.
Cynthia Linton, Deputy Managing Editor
Adjunct professor at Medill School of Journalism, teaching Media Management Project, Health & Science, News 21. Formerly spent 20 with community newspaper chain, ending up as executive editor for 5 years. Conducted research at Northwestern on media coverage of race and ethnicity. Published The Ethnic Handbook with the Illinois Ethnic Coalition and The Color of Leadership with the Media Management Center. Co-chair of Air & Energy Committee of Sierra Club, Chicago group. Has blog on global warming, http://earthlingangst.blogspot.com.
Alissa Swango , Media Advisor
Alissa Swango is a producer at chicagotribune.com. She joined the online team at the Chicago Tribune in 2007 after previously working at usatoday.com and msnbc.com. Alissa received her bachelor's degree in journalism and art from the University of Iowa, and her did her graduate study in journalism at Columbia University.
