Your search for Jeff Gillies returned 46 results

Echo turnover builds a network of Great Lakes savvy journalists

Turnover is frustrating at university-based news organizations. Just as a reporter hits her or his stride, they graduate and move on to another venue. Of course fostering the growth that allows that to happen is fulfilling for an educator. But I’d also argue that in the long-run, it’s also good for the longterm quality of Echo’s journalism. For with every reporter we train here at Echo, we expand our network of journalists who keep us abreast of creative newsgathering elsewhere, provide Great Lakes news tips and become potential freelancers for when we secure funding for that kind of thing.

In search of transparency

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had an interesting take last week on a Feb. 3 report out of the International Upper Great Lakes Study board. The news story questioned whether the report provided an unbiased view, and quoted one person confused over whether the information represented a “straight-up” news piece.  You can read reporter Dan Egan’s take here. Echo reporter Jeff Gillies, who had referenced the IJC report in a post the day before, disagreed with that assessment.

Our favorite reader comments of 2010

Annually the Echo staff collects our favorite comments of the previous year.

For the next three days we will publish a sample of the reader reactions that our reporters enjoyed in 2010.

Here’s the start:

Canadian policy restricting access to environment scientists harms two nations

Canadian federal environment officials are explicitly covered by an entry in Echo’s reporters’ guide:  “We like Canadians. But good heavens they have an incredible government bureaucracy. You need a Canadian government source? Get hustling early in the reporting.”

That’s why I was unsurprised to read criticism of Environment Canada’s lack of transparency in the Sept. 25 Montreal Gazette.

Satellite watch: Animated Lake Huron ice breakup

Worry wanes over the chance of flooding brought on by the melting ice bridge at the southern tip of Lake Huron. But a few freighters heading through the St. Clair River have gotten stuck in ice chunks that are gathered up like “sand bunched in an hourglass,” Tammy Stables Battaglia writes in the Detroit Free Press. The hourglass metaphor is apt. You can see it in action here:

Logging off: Breaking and rebuilding desk jockeys

The rules were explicit: “There will be no women or whining, blogging or Tweeting. “There will be whiskey, blood, rocks, fires, snot rockets, swearing, heavily peppered meats, and probably a night or two of freezing our tails off,” the e-mail read. Can four well-domesticated, NPR- listening, chair-swiveling journalists, pushed until they bust like cheap jump drives, turn into steel filing cabinets? It took two planning sessions at local dive bars, dozens of e-mail conversations and online chats before we set out to see. We did it under the auspices of the newly formed Northwoods Organization for Maintaining Authentic Allegiance with Michigan – NOMAAM – and with a plan to hike the 20-mile Manistee River Trail in the Manistee- Huron National Forest.

Animating the Lake Huron ice bridge breakup

A huge mass of ice at the southern tip of Lake Huron has the Canadian Coast Guard worried, according to the London Free Press and Port Huron Times Herald. Ice builds up there every year, but a warm spell could break up the mass into chunks too big to flow through the St. Clair River. That happened in 1984 and caused big problems.

The Times Herald has a cool interactive panoramic photo of the ice from the Blue Water Bridge. But suckers for satellite imagery should check out NOAA’s Great Lakes Coast Watch for a bird’s-eye view.

Jeff Gillies

A sneak peek at GLRI proposals

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave us a peek this weekend at what groups vying for Great Lakes Restoration Initiative cash hope to do with it. The deadline for the EPA’s first request for proposals under the GLRI was Jan. 29. The agency reports that it took in 1,057 proposals for $946 million worth of projects. A list of every proposal is available here, though there isn’t much to learn besides the first five to 10 words of each proposal’s title.