|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2009 Grantham Prize Seminar To Honor Winners, Feature NOAA Chief |
ABC’s Blakemore to Interview NOAA Administrator Lubchenco
NARRAGANSETT, RI, September 14, 2009 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The fourth annual Grantham Prize Seminar on the State of Environmental Journalism will be held on Monday, October 5, at The Newseum's Knight Conference Center in Washington, DC, the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting has announced.
The program will honor the year's best environmental journalism from the United States and Canada, featuring presentations by the 2009 Grantham Prize winners and Award of Special Merit recipients. The Grantham Prize Seminar will conclude with a discussion between Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Under Secretary of Commerce and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Mr. Bill Blakemore, veteran environmental correspondent for ABC News. Dr. Lubchenco, an accomplished marine ecologist, has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to improving the communication of science to broad audiences. In a wide-ranging interview conducted by Blakemore, Dr. Lubchenco will share her thoughts about the value of scientific communication between the scientific community and the media, as well as the specific environmental policy challenges facing the nation and the world. The Grantham Prize Seminar is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. The registration deadline is September 21. To register online visit the Grantham Prize website, www.granthamprize.org or call 401-874-6009. The 2009 Grantham Prize Seminar will be held in the Knight Conference Center of The Newseum, a 250,000-square-foot museum offering visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-minute technology and hands-on exhibits. The Grantham Prize Seminar will open at 4:30 p.m. with presentations by the Grantham Prize winners and Award of Special Merit recipients, followed by audience questions. The awards will then be followed by a reception for all registered attendees. The Seminar will conclude with the Blakemore-Lubchenco interview beginning at 8:00 p.m. USA TODAY's Blake Morrison and Brad Heath are the 2009 recipients of the $75,000 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment, the largest cash prize for journalism in the world. Their award-winning series "The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America's Schools" is a compelling, data-intense investigative series on industrial pollution near schools. The series motivated U.S. EPA to establish new monitoring programs nationwide to assess the risk of these exposures. Grantham Prize jurors described the winning series as taking "science-based journalism to a new level" and added that "the scale and ambition of this series, as well as its quick effect in raising awareness of the potential dangers to schoolchildren make ' The Smokestack Effect ' a worthy winner of the 2009 Grantham Prize." Three Awards of Special Merit, each receiving a $5,000 prize, will also be presented at the Seminar to: Tad Fettig, Karena Albers, and Veronique Bernard of kontentreal for their documentary "e2: transport"; Andrew Nikiforuk, for his book, "Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent"; and Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger for their Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series "Chemical Fallout". Detailed information can be found online at www.granthamprize.org. The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment created the Grantham Prize in 2005. The Prize honors exemplary reporting on the environment that has the potential to bring about constructive change. The annual prize is open to all media for work produced within the U.S. or Canada, and recognizes nonfiction work originally published or broadcast in the previous year. The Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting was established in 1997 with funding from three media foundations and is named for the late Michael P. Metcalf, a visionary in journalism and publisher of The Providence Journal Bulletin. The Metcalf Institute is a leading provider of science training for reporters and editors to improve the accuracy and clarity of environmental reporting, offering journalism fellowships in support of diversity and reporting on science and the environment. The Grantham Prize is funded by Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham through The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. The foundation supports climate change research and natural resource conservation programs in the United States and internationally. Jeremy Grantham is a Boston-based investment strategist and Hannelore Grantham is the director of The Grantham Foundation. Contact: Kat Anderson Metcalf Institute/Grantham Prize kat@gso.uri.edu, 401-874-6009 www.granthamprize.org |
|
|