Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/author/dave/page/32/)
Commentary
Many reporters of my generation went into journalism because of the Watergate scandal. Holding public officials accountable — public service journalism – was the attraction then. So, too, were Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the president’s men, the movie version of that story. Me? I was more of a Lou Grant kind of guy.
Commentary
The local historical society recently hosted a panel discussion of the history of the Lansing (Michigan) State Journal. That’s my local newspaper and I was particularly interested in the event as I had once worked there as an editor. What really caught my interest in a video of the discussion was a longtime State Journal staffer’s explanation of the publication’s increasing use of metrics to measure how news is consumed. She described how a video screen in the newsroom reports and ranks in real time the top 10 stories that people are reading online. Every week reporters get a report of how many people read their stories each day.
Echo is considering a redesign. I say that with some trepidation. I have found that technical and design questions regarding web projects can paralyze action. The delays frustrate getting quality content into your hands fast. And Echo works now.
You may have caught this weird judicial twist in a recent Great Lakes Echo story: A Wisconsin judge ruled that manure was not a waste but a valuable commodity. That’s no surprise. Anyone with a backyard garden knows that. But providing that legal stamp produced a counter-intuitive outcome. It meant that an insurer was on the hook for damages when a farm polluted nearby wells with that valuable manure.
Great Lakes school administrators are among those who hold out the longest before closing schools for snow, according to this map of how many inches trigger such an action. Any snow – in fact, any prediction of snow – triggers closings in the south, according to mapmaker Alexandr Trubetskoy, who recently posted the map to Reddit. That doesn’t necessarily mean administrators in the south are wimps. Areas without much snow also don’t have much snow removal equipment. Trubetskoy identified himself as a high school student from Vienna, Va., in a Reddit message to Great Lakes Echo.
By Great Lakes Echo
Check out this nifty graphic produced by QUEST and that details strategies for keeping Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. Better yet, check out the story that goes with it.
Folks in our neck of the woods tend to be a bit biased regarding big lakes. That’s understandable when 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water flows through our region. But are North America’s lakes the greatest of lakes? That depends on how you measure. Lake Superior has a surface area of 31,700 square miles dwarfing Siberia’s Lake Baikal’s mere 12,248 square miles. But at 25 million years old and with a depth of 5,600 feet (Lake Superior is only 1,330 feet deep), Lake Baikal is the oldest, deepest lake in the world.
We’re always on the look out for innovative stories and reporting techniques at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. In a couple weeks we’ll launch a series on civilian applications of drones for gathering information about the environment. I teach a course encompassing remote sensing, including the use of drones, as newsgathering tools. So a story in the print edition of the New York Times, Drones Offer Journalists a Wider View, caught my eye at Monday’s breakfast table. It’s an interesting enough piece about a controversial technology.
Check out this map for a scary picture of wind over the Great Lakes around 9 p.m. Sunday. This static shot doesn’t do it justice. Click the image to catch the animation. Of course, if you’re seeing this long after the wind has died, it won’t be as impressive. Just know that Sunday evening would have been an exciting time for a Chicago to Mackinac Island reach.
If you had the chance, how would you recreate the United States? John Lavey, a land use planner at the Sonoran Institute, designed this map that divvies up the country by its watersheds. The idea is to use water more efficiently while minimizing conflicts over its use. He gerrymandered state boundaries by Hydrologic Unit Codes, keeping capitals and national borders intact. Not a bad idea.