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2009 Risser Prize Winners

Two reporters and a photographer for the Seattle Times have won the 2009 James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.

Hal Bernton	Justin Mayo	Steve Ringman

Hal Bernton, Justin Mayo and Steve Ringman won the $5,000 prize for their two-part series, "Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong," which demonstrated how heavy logging in southwestern Washington had accounted for a significant proportion of landslides in the region.

• Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong, the Seattle Times

Two other entries were recognized with special citations. Leah Beth Ward, of the Yakima Herald-Republic, was recognized for her series, "Hidden Wells, Dirty Water," and Erik Denison, of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio, was recognized for his story, "A Toxic Tale," which aired on the program, The Current.

• Hidden Wells, Dirty Water, Yakima Herald-Republic
• A Toxic Tale (part of the Dirty Oil series), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National Radio

The award and citations were announced by James Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford. The Knight Fellowships program and the Bill Lane Center for the American West co-sponsor the award. Members of the Seattle Times team will be invited to Stanford later in the year to participate in a symposium focusing on the issues raised in their series.

The Seattle Times series used sophisticated mapping software to document the impact of the years of clear-cutting by timber giant Weyerhaeuser, mostly with little regulatory oversight. The newspaper found that clear-cutting accounted for nearly one-third of the landslides in the areas it examined. One judge said the project "stood out for its ambition, its persistence and its compelling conclusions. The combination of computer-assisted reporting and strong interviews offered a template that should be used for journalists covering timber controversies and other land use debates across the West."

Bernton has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 2000, and has reported widely from around the Northwest as well as overseas. Bernton previously worked at The Oregonian and The Anchorage Daily News, where he worked on a series about the plight of Alaska's Native people that won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Mayo has been a reporter with The Seattle Times' investigative team for more than ten years, specializing in computer-assisted reporting, covering issues such as courts, demographics, elections, education and housing. Before coming to The Times, he was the database administrator at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting in Columbia, Missouri.

Steve Ringman has more than 30 years experience as a newspaper photojournalist. He has photographed the Contra War in Nicaragua, earthquakes in El Salvador and San Francisco, global warming effects in the Arctic and the Bering Sea and most recently, malaria-relief efforts in Tanzania and Zambia. Before joining the Times, he worked for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Ward's series showed that as many as 30,000 residents of the Lower Yakima Valley, most of them Latino farm workers, had been drinking well water contaminated by nitrates - a situation that developed after years of benign neglect by government agencies responsible for public health. One judge said the reporting "alerted communities across the state to the nitrate pollution that appeared in their water supplies through gaps in government oversight and has given a moving portrait of the citizens who are suffering the consequences." The project was made possible with the assistance of a University of Southern California Annenberg/California Endowment Health Fellowship.

Denison's story culminated two years of reporting on how companies mining Alberta's tar sands for oil have been creating lakes of toxic black sludge, causing the deaths of thousands of ducks and raising fears of higher cancer rates. One judge said Denison's reporting "showed great persistence in documenting the myriad troubling consequences of one of the globe's most spectacular and potentially dangerous environmental nightmares. His reporting helped put the tar sands/toxics story on the international map." Denison has since left CBC but continues to file freelance for the network and is also working on a documentary.

The prize is given in the name of James V. Risser, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and director emeritus of the Knight Fellowships program.

Judges of the contest were John Daley, a reporter at KSL-TV, Salt Lake City and a 2007-08 Knight Fellow; Philip Hilts, director, Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT; Judy Pasternak, writer and author, and winner of the Risser Prize in 2007; and Paul Rogers, environment writer, San Jose Mercury News, and managing editor, "QUEST," KQED, San Francisco.

The Risser Prize was established in 2005 and is open to print, broadcast and online journalists writing about environmental issues in western regions of Canada, Mexico and the United States. The prize was established in recognition of Risser's outstanding journalism career and his leadership of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists from 1985 until his retirement in 2000. Risser is a former Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register, and he wrote frequently and incisively about environmental issues. He has had a particular interest in those issues as they affected the western United States.

In judging the awards, preference is given to stories about environmental issues that are distinctively Western. The judges placed a premium on stories that explained complicated situations, stories that exposed undiscovered or covered-up problems and stories with ramifications beyond the immediate dimensions of the issue being covered.

The Knight Fellowships program annually brings 12 outstanding mid-career U.S. journalists and as many as nine from other countries to study at Stanford in a one-year program. More than 700 journalists have studied at Stanford under the program since it began in 1966. James Bettinger is director of the program. Dawn E. Garcia is deputy director.

The Bill Lane Center for the American West was established at Stanford in 2002. In 2005 it was endowed by L. W. "Bill" Lane Jr., former publisher of Sunset magazine. The Center is dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America. It supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Stanford history Professors David M. Kennedy and Richard White are co-directors of the program. Jon Christensen is executive director.