Since 1993, the Natural Resources News Service has helped reporters and producers undertake some of the most important environmental stories broken in the last 15 years.

If you have not heard of us, it is because we have always worked in the background. But if you have seen major stories on arsenic standards, toxins, TCE, perchlorate, water runoff, military contamination, ship breaking, mercury, coal, and endocrine disruptors in places like the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times, you have probably read our work. If you listened to or watched NPR, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NHK, Bloomberg, or a host of others, you have heard and seen our work on issues like environmental extortion, factory farms, improper influence at EPA, fish kills and many others.

Our career investigative reporters develop important stories and work with the media to bring them to the public. If you need help on a story, we are standing by to assist you.

We are foundation funded and nonpartisan.

Editors and reporters who have worked with us will tell you our reporting standards are high and our work is often groundbreaking. The purpose of this website is to broaden the community we work with. We believe the most cost effective and efficient way to accomplish our mission of public education on the environment is through reporting distributed on all news venues. You are invited to take ideas from the site or pick up the stories. We are happy to put you in touch with our reporters so you can work with them. All we ask is that you let us know what you do with the information.

The purpose of www.naturalresourcesnewsservice.org is to provide bloggers, individual reporters, editors, news directors and others involved in media a new resource for ideas and help. We want our colleagues at the Society of Environmental Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors to take story ideas on this site and run with them. We also welcome contributions to the site. If you have a story idea for us, please call or email us. If you need help with a story, that is what we do. We can help you find a reputable expert or source or help you find the right document or accurate data.

If you are working on something exclusive, we can still help. We promise to keep your story exclusive.

Recently NRNS developed national stories on contaminated rivers and water shortages.

On December 9, 2007, Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post wrote a story about rivers contaminated with atrazine from farm runoff. Documents obtained by NRNS revealed startling levels of atrazine that the EPA had concealed for years.

Stories about water shortages reached the public through Portfolio and the Bloomberg wire service. A February 2008 Portfolio story by Peter Waldman focused on rampant commercial development in Nevada aided by Senator Harry Reid, who co-sponsored a law clearing the way for a water pipeline stretching hundreds of miles between the Great Basin and Las Vegas putting the desert ecosystem at risk. The Bloomberg story was transmitted on November 6, 2007 and described speculator interest in an emerging water rights market. These stories created interest in how water is allocated, and we are assisting reporters with follow-up stories on the unsustainability of many developments.

NRNS completed the first story on Vibrio wound infections broadcast on May 29, 2007. News media throughout the country subsequently gave the issue wide attention. The piece aired by the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C., was covered by the Poynter Institute in June. Poynter interviewed the correspondent, Roberta Baskin, who described the role of NRNS from the perspective of the bylined reporter.

NRNS’s work on perchlorate and trichloroethylene (TCE) ran on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times and described government policies that had confounded environmentalists and scientists for decades.

NRNS is often out front on stories. In June 2005, the Washington Post broke a NRNS-assisted story on high levels of estrogen and anti-depressants found in water supplies. On March 10, 2008, the AP ran front-page, multi-part stories across the nation on pharmaceuticals found in drinking water.

Our site–www.naturalresourcesnewsservice.org –is designed for reporters, editors, producers, bloggers, writers and anyone else who disseminate information to the public to use as a source of ideas and inspiration. We hope you find it useful to your work and look forward to working with you.