“Chesapeake: Bay on the Brink” Web site launched

Swimming in the rivers that feed the Chesapeake Bay could be as hazardous as hopping into an unflushed toilet, an investigation by reporters at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism found.

The finding was based on water quality samples gathered by a team of 10 journalists this summer as part of a special reporting project exploring the fate of the Chesapeake Bay.

The team launched a multimedia Web site this month titled “Chesapeake: Bay on the Brink”

(http://chesapeake.news21.com,) featuring the river water analysis and more than 20 other bay-related news stories.

The team spent 10 weeks reporting on the Chesapeake Bay’s pollution problems part of a national fellowship program called News21, which is held at eight top journalism schools each summer with funding from The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The students, supervised by faculty at Merrill College, asked why the nation’s largest estuary remains severely impaired despite billions of dollars spent on cleanup efforts. Nine of the fellows were students or recent graduates of UM’s Merrill College; one was visiting from the University of Missouri’s journalism school.

Among the features of UM’s new Bay on the Brink Web site:

• In-depth text, video and photo stories exploring why the bay remains so polluted, despite a 26-year cleanup effort by the states in the Chesapeake watershed in partnership with federal agencies.
• “Bay Explorer,” a mixed-media, nonlinear storytelling experiment
• “Chesapeake Voices,” a collection of video interviews with stakeholders in the bay, presented in a novel video player created by UM’s News21 team
• “Naked Chesapeake,” a short video about the estuary’s natural beauty
• “The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Directory,” a guide to more than 130 Web sites of groups involved in bay-related activities.  The directory includes an interactive map of webcams showing live streaming video and photos of the bay and its tributaries.

Among the stories the team produced were two showing how dangerous it can be to swim in the bay or its tributaries after heavy rain. The stories were based on bacteria tests on water samples which the News21 team took from the bay’s rivers and streams before and after heavy rainfall.

The results were compared to toilet water containing unflushed human waste. In some cases, the river water was up to six times dirtier.

The Bay on the Brink project was produced in Studio C, the state-of-the-art multimedia lab on the third floor of the $30 million Knight Hall Journalism Building, which opened this year.

“This studio is our garage band space, and our News21 fellows were the first to play in there,” said Journalism Dean Kevin Klose, the former National Public Radio chief who joined Maryland last year. “It was exciting to watch them work in teams as they experimented with new ways of blending video, audio and text.”

The News21 program (short for News in the 21st Century) is designed to train top journalism graduates to do in-depth reporting on topics of public significance and present stories in new and compelling ways. A key goal is to spark the kind of innovation that will help graduates develop the vision and skills needed to lead the industry through an era of enormous change.

Leslie Walker and Chris Harvey, both faculty members at Merrill College, supervised the project. The students received coaching from three other journalism faculty members and several outside professionals. Serving as lead editorial consultant was Timothy B. Wheeler, the environmental reporter for The Baltimore Sun.  Wheeler also helped to teach the preparatory seminar about the Chesapeake Bay which all the students took in the spring.

The Baltimore Sun was a key partner for the project, publishing four stories produced by the News21 fellows. Other newspapers around the bay region also published their work; the story about pollution after heavy rainfall appeared in more than a dozen news outlets.

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