Scripps Fellow Eric Frankowski Takes SEJ Reporting Award

By Emily Cooper

When this year’s Ted Scripps Fellows traveled to New Orleans for the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference, they had a winner in their midst.

At the opening night awards banquet, Fellow Eric Frankowski and Bruce Plasket, Frankowski’s colleague while he was at the Longmont (Colo.) Daily Times-Call, won the SEJ’s top award in the “Small Market Reporting—Print” category for their contribution to a series on the Cotter Corporation, a uranium milling company near Cañon City, Colo.

SEJ judges noted the series was “an exemplary investigative series on nuclear contamination, an issue of national significance.” They also commended the reporters for their “elegantly lucid writing.”

The series arose from a controversial proposal by Cotter to store hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive soil from the cleanup of a New Jersey Superfund site in its tailings ponds, themselves already a Superfund site. The project grew to include stories on Cotter’s record of safety and health violations, its history of accepting radioactive materials for onsite storage, and the economic future of uranium milling.

The Cotter series was two and a half months in the making. During that time Lehman Communications Corp., owner of the Times-Call and five other Colorado papers including the Cañon City Daily Record, freed a four-person team that included Frankowski and Plasket to work on the project full time. Frankowski said he spent the first couple of weeks just reading background material, including “unknown hours” on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s website.

Frankowski and Plasket also interviewed Cotter executives, mill employees, anti-Cotter activists, and state health department officials. One of their key sources was Deyon Boughton, the widow of Cotter’s former chief chemist, whom Frankowski called “a fountain of knowledge.”

“The biggest eye opener for me was the kind of effort and resources it takes to do something good,” Frankowski said, noting that the entire newsroom had to work longer hours to make up for the missing reporters.

But the effort paid off. In addition to the SEJ award, the Cotter series also won the Scripps Howard Foundation’s prestigious National Journalism Award for Environmental Reporting.

Frankowski plans to use of the knowledge he gained from his Cotter research for his Fellowship project, which will examine the effects of uranium mining and milling for the University of Colorado’s Nuclear West project.

Emily Cooper is a master’s student in environmental journalism at CU and the graduate assistant for the Center for Environmental Journalism.