2008 Grantham Prize Seminar

The third annual Grantham Prize Seminar on the State of Environmental Journalism was held at the Freedom Forum's Newseum on September 8th, 2008, to honor the year’s best environmental journalism from the U.S. and Canada. The day-long program began with presentations by each of the Grantham Prize Award of Special Merit recipients, and culminated in a presentation by the 2008 Grantham Prize winner, The New York Times. Reporter Jim Yardley spoke on behalf of the eight person team that developed the winning series, "Choking on Growth."

Grantham Prize Jury Chair, Philip Meyer, presented an historical perspective in his introduction to the winners of the 2008 Grantham Prize.

"Four decades ago, Scotty Reston, the chief of the New York Times Washington Bureau published a little book called 'The Artillery of the Press.' One of its central themes was this: Things don't have to 'happen' to become news. They can just be going on quietly. It was a warning to journalists not to become so preoccupied with events that we fail to see the patterns that they are forming. And if we can’t see the patterns, we won’t be motivated to find the underlying structures that cause the patterns.

"Reporting on the environment is a perfect example of news that is just going on quietly – all the time. Its reporting can’t wait for dramatic events. This year’s winning entry is a wonderful example of pattern-seeking, structure-finding journalism. It didn’t wait for the dam to collapse to report on the environmental mess that China was making for itself. And it demonstrated yet again the healing power of information but in a way that Reston could not have anticipated. A story published in New York led to reforms in China. Such is the power of the Internet."

Said reporter Jim Yardley on behalf of the winning team, "we are thrilled to win this award. This was an enormous investment of time, and resources, and energy, and passion for the China Bureau of The New York Times, but [also] The Times in general."

Yardley went on to describe the focus of the winning series.

"In watching everyone else's presentation [today], I was struck [that] much of the other reporting was about the effect of global warming, climate change, and of the potentialities of that in the world. China is about the cause...and there is no more dramatic or extreme example of the impact of environmental degradation."

"Part of our goal was not just to focus on the China...you might have seen in the Olympics...but to get out to the rest of the country, where much of the industrialization and environmental problems are."

Through excellent reporting, beautiful photographs, and a stellar multimedia effort -- including audio and written translations of the stories in Chinese -- the Choking on Growth team achieved this goal, and attendees were fascinated to hear what it took to produce the series.

After the winners' presentations, attendees received complimentary access to the Newseum exhibits. The Grantham Prize Seminar program resumed in the evening for a panel discussion, "The Climate Policy Puzzle: Piecing Together Solutions."

Panelists brought a wide variety of scientific, political, journalistic, and business perspectives to the question of what it will take to create a successful national policy to address climate change. The discussion ranged from an overview of the presidential candidates' energy and climate change policy proposals to the scientific basis for acting on climate change, to the unique political, economic ,and social challenges inherent in this undertaking.

The entire program was webcast live and the archived broadcast is available here.