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Tegan Wendland has been living in New Orleans for three years and has seen three tornadoes hit the city. She covered her first tornado in 2017 and another in 2020 as a reporter for NPR News station WWNO.
During the March tornado, however, she had shifted from reporting on breaking news to planning long-term coverage of the region’s environment.
Wendland was born on a Wisconsin subsistence farm. She spent seven years working as a journalist in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Louisiana. These experiences shaped her view and will guide the direction. Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk.
“Living in one of the most precarious places in the nation makes me acutely aware of the experiences that many thousands of people across the country are having right now — the direct personal experience that they’re having with the impacts of a changing climate,” Wendland said from her home in New Orleans.
As editorial director of the Ag & Water Desk, a collaborative reporting project based out of the University of Missouri School of Journalism that will launch this summer, Wendland and her team will examine agricultural and environmental issues from the Upper Midwest down to the Gulf of Mexico.
The collaboration has hired five experienced journalists to act as advisors. They will also build a distribution network to share news with newsrooms across the country. Recent Article for the Columbia Journalism ReviewWendland spoke out about the difficulties of sharing stories between newsrooms with incompatible distribution or editing systems.
A recent grant from the Reynolds Journalism Institute will help the desk build its distribution network; some of the funding will be used to purchase the Associated Press’ StoryShare, a password-protected tool that shares high-resolution images, videos and text. Wendland hopes to give Ag & Water’s essential coverage to news organizations for free, but she noted the perfect sharing tool doesn’t exist yet.
“Some of our newspapers might not even have websites. …They might just have a print edition,” she said. “But hopefully we’ll be able to reach a wide range of outlets and make it easier on their end by offering so many options.”
Mizzou’s School of Journalism partnered with Report for America to assign ten reporters to newsrooms across the region including WNIJ in DeKalb, Ill., and Harvest Public Media, the public media journalism collaborative based at KCUR in Kansas City, Mo. A $1.4 million, three-year grant from the Walton Family Foundation supports staff costs, including Wendland’s role as editorial director, the Report for America corps members and Executive Director Sara Shipley Hiles, an associate professor at Mizzou. The foundation previously funded environmental journalism initiatives such as the Times-Picayune‘s Louisiana coastal reporting team and the Water Desk out of the University of Colorado.
Shipley Hiles is also familiar with the challenges faced by farmers working the land near the Mississippi River Basin. She grew up in Missouri on a commercial hog farm that her family started in the 1980s. It was the beginning of consolidated farm operations. She said that her upbringing in agriculture helped her to understand how farming is a lifestyle for many families and a point she was proud of.
“One thing that I feel is really important is not to frame the work we’re doing as farmers versus environmentalists. I never want to see that headline or that framing on the story because I don’t think that’s accurate and it’s not helpful, either,” she said. “We need to understand that people who farm very much care about the environment. People who identify as environmentalists also care about farming, and they care about where their food comes from.”
Earlier this week, Shipley Hiles held a call with the desk’s team of journalists to plan stories. The collaborative will tackle agricultural and water issues that affect communities in the basin, such as increased precipitation, a consequence of climate change that’s causing more runoff from farm fields to flow down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico.
Shipley Hiles and Wendland spoke out in support of the dead zoneAs a result of nutrient runoff, it is a hypoxic area covering 6,334-miles in the gulf, where marine life and fish are suffering from oxygen deprivation.
Despite the looming crisis in Louisiana’s waters, few newsrooms in the state have a reporter dedicated to the environmental beat. WWNO reporter Halle Parker, one of the collaborative’s expert journalists, is one of them. She’s covered environmental justice and reported on communities that are vulnerable to climate change. In her role at the desk, she’ll advise reporters on best practices for speaking with people from communities undergoing trauma, she said.
Parker hopes the funding from the desk will boost her ability to dig into issues that don’t stop at state borders, like energy-grid reliability. She wants her stories to be more than environmental issues.
“At least then there’s more of an action…to give people something to latch onto,” she said. “A little bit more than just seeing that it’s all doom and gloom.”
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