that just offended the heil out of everybody who reads the Herald 

 Journal, with the exception of me and two or three other people. We 

 got letters to the editor for three weeks about that thing. Now you 

 ta4(e a guess how many subscriptions we lost over that. And I mean 

 people were incensed about this. They were writing and making 

 anonymous telephone calls about my future day after day. We lost three 

 subscribers. So any time if you get into a philosophical discussion with 

 a newspaper editor about how aggressive he or she might be about 

 covering news and they say, "Oh, we can't get into these issues, it's 

 too touchy," just tell them it's BS because that's not the way it is in 

 the Rocky Mountain region. 



But back to the point. You're dealing with a whole flock of 

 different philosophies and different attitudes about publishing 

 newspapers. When I worked in Montana, the daily newspapers were 

 just sort of getting out of the old historic business of having been 

 controlled and owned by the two biggest corporations in the state. I 

 don't know how newspapers here are now. I gather from what Bill 

 Brown is saying that newspapers in Wyoming leave a little bit to be 

 desired. I think that as agency representatives and as 



people--environmental scientists, universities, whatevei — you need to 

 know who you're dealing with. You need to get into the philosophies of 

 your local newspaper and know how to approach people that way. 

 That's one way that you can really avoid some problems. You need to 

 know what to expect and know what not to expect. How you go about 

 changing those kinds of things over a long period of time, I don't 

 know. Newspapers are in business to make money and if the people 

 who own and operate them feel that they can't really deal substantially 

 with issues and still make money, then you've got a problem. 



I think one of the biggest problems that we face at the Herald 

 Journal--and whether or not anybody else knows it, most newspapers 

 face it--is the job of translation. You're dealing with environmental 

 sciences, especially now that energy is the big topic. Incidentally, we 

 just got through doing a survey of all the managing editors of daily 

 newspapers in the five northern Rocky Mountain states. Almost every 

 one of them ranks energy or some kind of environmental coverage as 

 their top, ongoing story. That amazed me when we got those 

 questionnaires back that everybody felt that way. But these kinds of 

 topics are extremely difficult for journalists to translate. Our first 

 pane at this conference included William Ritz from The Denver Post who 

 does nothing all day but write about energy topics. This guy has an 

 excellent job. He has an opportunity to deal with one aspect of 

 environmental reporting. Consequently, he can be excellently 



prepared. He can be well backgrounded. He can take the time to do 

 the research to learn the terms. Let me give you an example. Our 

 paper is an afternoon paper. If I assign someone to cover a speech or 

 to do an interview at 10 in the morning involving some pretty 

 complicated environmental scientific principles, I need to send someone 

 on that assigment who knows all the languages. I need to send 

 somebody who knows what phreatophytes are and what riparian habitats 

 are and all the rest of it. A lot of us can't even spell those words, let 

 alone translate them for the public. And that, as far as I'm concerned 



