FOOD AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTING NETWORK
This organization has already been registered
Someone in your organization has already registered and setup an account. would you like to join their team?Profile owner : t**l@t*****n.o*g
Mission Statement
The Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) is the first and only independent, nonprofit, news organization that produces award-winning, high-impact investigative and explanatory reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health through partnerships with regional and national media outlets. Through our impartial “watchdog” journalism we seek to shine a light on injustices and abuses of power within the food system — both corporate and governmental — while taking full measure of the true impact food and agriculture have on public health and the environment. FERN uncovers, explores, and explains news that is critical to the public’s right to know about food, agriculture, and environmental health.
About This Cause
The Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) is the first and only independent, nonprofit, news organization that produces award-winning investigative and explanatory reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health through partnerships with regional and national media outlets. Through impartial journalism, FERN explores the full impact of food and agriculture on public health and the environment, including shining a light on injustices and abuses of power, both corporate and governmental. We uncover and explain news that is critical to the public’s right to know about food, agriculture, and environmental health. At a time when facts, science, and independent media are under assault, FERN remains a trusted source for rigorously reported, fact-based journalism. FERN primarily produces news articles of between 1,500 and 5,000 words, and functions as a full-service news organization. FERN's process includes story and pitch development, contracting with journalists, providing editorial support and services and negotiating distribution agreements with mainstream publications. FERN complements its written reports with infographics and other visualizations, with social media activity, through radio and television broadcast collaborations, and through live events. FERN rigorously tracks the impact of its stories using a range of metrics. We follow strict ethical guidelines in our news-gathering and publishing to assure that our reporting is grounded in accuracy, impartiality and reasoned analysis. FERN operates free from hidden agendas or biases and preserves total editorial independence by maintaining a strict firewall among funders, the Board of Directors, and our editorial operations. FERN provides the editorial expertise to fill gaps in coverage that have arisen due to the ongoing and accelerating disruption by digital technology of the traditional media business model, and thereby expands public understanding of these crucial issues. While there was some hope that news organizations would solve their revenue issues through diversification, media disruption continues to this day, even among the new generation of venture-funded startup news organizations. FERN stories have appeared in a wide range of outlets, including ABC's World News Tonight, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Eating Well, Mother Jones, Pacific Standard, Harper’s, The Nation, Fast Company, The Guardian, Sunset magazine, PRI’s the World, NPR's Latino USA, the San Francisco Chronicle, and California Sunday. We have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to deliver high-impact journalism that reaches a large audience. In the last year alone, several of our stories have helped spur policy changes at the international, national, and state levels. Our collaborative distribution model gives us the rare ability to reach audiences that are not already exposed to, or familiar with, the issues bound up in food and agriculture. Our capacity to deliver such results is significant at a time when the philanthropic community is focused on the social return on its investments and impact. FERN maintains that truly independent journalism is crucial to making change. Indeed, independent reporting from a trusted source can have an outsized effect on public-policy debates. A 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation based in New York and operating since 2011, FERN has worked with 42 freelance writers on 84 stories that have appeared in 42 outlets. FERN is a member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the primary industry association for nonprofit news organizations, and has built key partnerships with other nonprofit news outlets like the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and Public Radio International. We share the ultimate goal of all investigative journalists: to empower individuals and organizations to advocate for change at the corporate and governmental level. In aggregate, our stories have reached over 150 million Americans. We also produce FERN’s Ag Insider, a daily food and agriculture policy paid subscription news service and have just released our first book, The Dirt: Dispatches from the front lines of food and farming 2011-2016, an anthology of our first five years of reporting. Our recent published work of note includes: Seeding Doubt by award-winning writer Liza Gross examines how self-appointed guardians of "sound science" tip the scales toward industry. Published with new media partner The Intercept. Oil Barrens written by Jocelyn Zuckerman for Audubon Magazine. As palm oil finds its way into an astonishing half of all grocery-store products, Indonesian rainforests are falling to make way for plantations, releasing vast quantities of CO₂ and giving poachers easy access to endangered species. Is Dry Farming the Next Wave in a Drought-Plagued World? written by Ari LeVaux for National Geographic. Some fruit growers in California eschew irrigation and have escaped the financial fallout experienced by fellow farmers in recent years. This Kansas farmer fought a government program to keep his farm sustainable Kristin Ohlson puts a human face on crop insurance in this piece produced with Ensia. It also details the hurdles to sustainable farming within the commodity system. The violent costs of the global palm oil boom writer Jocelyn Zuckerman reports on the dangers facing palm-oil activists. Published with new media partner The New Yorker. In 2017, we expect to release more than 20 hard-hitting long-form news stories and to support our stories with strong promotional campaigns. Our work is an ongoing demonstration of the important public-service journalism FERN makes possible at a moment when fact-based reporting is under fire and more crucial than ever.