E-Media Tidbits

By Joseph A. Davis
Freelance Writer-Editor

Paul, via Flickr (CC license) Scorecard.org, a landmark pollution database project, lost its value due to lack up maintenance and updating.

Technology can be a solution in search of a problem. Many journalists and environmentalists have seized on the promised miracle of online databases as the cure for whatever ails society.

But without foresight and long-term planning, these projects can end up being little more than acts of blind faith in the venerable cliche, "Knowledge is power."

Case in point: Scorecard, an environmental database application launched in 1998 by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). It sucked up data from a flotilla of obscure and barely-accessible U.S. Environmental Protection Agency databases and made it all relevant and applicable to the daily lives of everyone in the U.S. You could punch in your ZIP code and get a list of the toxins in your drinking water, the top polluters in your county or watershed, and the address to write with your complaint.

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Scorecard was a wild success...for awhile, in a way. Database guru Bill Pease deserves huge credit for the accomplishment, as does EDF for supporting it. Scorecard made waves. It supported local organizing groups. By showing the way, it pushed EPA to develop the Envirofacts Data Warehouse, the agency's own online user interface for its array of databases.

In some ways, success was what killed Scorecard.

Pease moved on to greener pastures in the software industry. Journalists who had hailed Scorecard as the best thing since sliced bread rarely got around to actually using it to build local (or national) stories. The evangelical zeal of the grassroots environmental movement of the 70s and 80s waned considerably in the 90s -- and even more in the post-9/11 timidity of the 2000s. And EDF was left with a huge financial burden maintaining the data-hungry behemoth.

In November 2005, the Environmental Defense Fund passed ownership of Scorecard to Green Media Toolshed. That smaller and less-funded group has since done little to update the database. Today, Scorecard lives on only as a shadow of its former self.

Scorecard's lesson for the news media: Use it or lose it. The fate of this database exemplifies a larger problem. For example, EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) -- once the quintessential database tool for environmental journalists -- began life in the late 1980s by fueling some spectacular stories. Eventually it lost its novelty and required too much knowledge and reporting for most overworked and behind-deadline daily reporters, and the stories became humdrum.

Throughout the two terms of the George W. Bush administration, industry groups got EPA to nibble TRI nearly to death. Journalists did not rush to its defense. So today TRI, too, is a shadow of its former self. Media's lack of investment in the database was one of the things that allowed the Bush administration to drag it into a dark alley and mug it.

This is not to say that database journalism -- or database-driven political organizing -- is dead. Rather, it lives perilously.

I and others are still jolted by the excitement and promise of new Web 2.0 ventures being spawned all the time by entities like the Sunlight Foundation and the Knight Foundation. Projects such as Sunlight's Earmark Watch and the Knight Citizen News Network arise from a vision of a post-newspaper world of collaborative research (including wikis) and grassroots or citizen journalism as the answer to the deadening of the mind and conscience of traditional journalism by corporate ownership.

The promise of infinite data for social transformation lives on in a few tidepools and backwaters. Witness David Pace's December 2005 Associated Press series Unhealthy Air -- a triumph of computer-assisted environmental journalism.

Pace's series was done with a new, third-generation EPA tool, Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI), which is freely available to the public and totally unnoticed by nearly all other journalists. In fact, RSEI is based on the raw Toxics Release Inventory data that EPA had worked so hard to make inaccessible to the public.

Take-away message: No database was or is easy enough for the public to make much use of by themselves. What's really needed is for good journalists to make heavy and productive use of existing data resources. Good journalists, good programmers, and good funders.

There are still a few databases you can punch a ZIP code into and find a shocking story. The question is whether there are still enough good journalists to make sense of them.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance journalist who edits the Society of Environmental Journalists' WatchDog newsletter on freedom of information matters, as well as other SEJ publications such as TipSheet and EJToday.