EHN reporting collaboration wins Lion Publishing Award

An investigation co-produced by Environmental Health News into toxic pollution in communities along the Houston Ship Channel has won a Lion Publishing Sustainability Award award for best collaboration.

The story, produced by the Altavoz Lab, EHN, palabra and The Texas Tribune, focuses on the community of Cloverleaf, one of many along the the 52-mile-long Houston Ship Channel that suffers from poor air quality. The ship channel is home to more than 200 petrochemical facilities that process fossil fuels into plastics, fertilizers and pesticides. Emissions pose significant health risks to the community.

Texas Tribune reporter Alejandra Martinez and freelance journalist Wendy Selene Pérez, both Altavoz Lab environmental fellows, spent months reporting from the community. They found that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s air monitoring system fails to measure some dangerous pollutants from nearby petrochemical plants, and provides air quality information to the public in formats that are difficult to understand – and often only in English. The information disparity leaves Latino-majority communities like Cloverleaf guessing about the safety of their air.

For this bilingual investigation, EHN partnered with the Altavoz Lab, a project that supports and mentors local journalists of color working in community publications. Environmental Health Sciences, the publisher of EHN, is a partner and one of the funders of the Altavoz Lab’s Environmental Fellowship. The project received additional support from the Pulitzer Center.

A month after the story was published, the reporters returned to Cloverleaf to ensure that those most affected by their reporting could make use of it. They met residents in laundromats, grocery stores and on the street, sharing both the story and easy-to-understand bilingual postcards explaining the health risks and ways people can protect themselves. In August, the reporters held community workshops centered around their reporting.

“This kind of intensive outreach represents a broader shift in the way forward-looking news organizations are thinking about community engagement and their responsibilities to the people whose stories they are sharing," Autumn Spanne, manager of EHN’s bilingual content, said. “It’s no longer adequate to parachute into a community, extract information and share it in ways that aren’t accessible to those most affected. You have to reach people where they are — just as Martinez and Pérez did.”

Lion stands for Local Independent Online News. The Lion Awards recognize outstanding local journalism centered on the organization’s three pillars of sustainability: operational resilience, financial health and journalistic impact. Univisión and the local news site La Esquina Texas republished the story in Spanish. An audio version of the story was also produced for Radio Bilingüe. These local and national partnerships extended the project’s reach.

“A lot of the credit for kickstarting the collaboration really goes to Alejandra Martínez and Wendy Selene Pérez who make up a formidable team reporting on the ground and getting even closer to their community,” said Valeria Fernández, Altavoz Lab’s founder. “There’s a lot that local journalists have to teach us about how we can work together as publications.”

“Through its collaboration with Environmental Health News, Altavoz Lab has created a model for operational partnership that goes beyond providing a fellowship,” judges said of the collaboration. “The organizations worked together to boost the impact of the fellows’ project by coordinating participating organizations that provided editorial, audience, and funding support.”

Read, listen and watch the Altavoz Lab story in English and in Spanish.

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