NYTimes, AP: Two very different ways to report on the natural gas boom in Colorado
Boom can mean ker-blam, or it can mean a lot of new jobs in town that may go as fast as they came and maybe leaving a mess in their wake. Take your pick today in these two from Colorado via the nation’s two most comprehensive news outlets. Both bear, with strikingly different news pegs, on the tremendous efforts by drillers to tap the natural gas that suffuses much of the state’s stratified bedrock.
- AP - Judith Kohler : Colorado county copes with methane mystery ; The oddness factor may bring more readers to this one, the inherently smaller story. She tells of a company that is drilling for and piping gas from fields south of Colorado Springs. Some of the areas reisdents blame it for chemicals including methane in the ground water. The lede vignette is on one family whose well has exploded. There is a singed tee shirt as proof. So they don’t use it anymore. Nicely reported – seems more sympathetic to the residents but it indicts nobody. It could have used at least one graf on the larger context of Colorado’s fast-growing natural gas industry.
- NY Times – Sean Patrick Farrell: Plan to Drill on Colorado Plateau Meets Resistance ; A big, muscular feature and policy analysis of a familiar sort, hence to some readers an instant favorite, to others a repetitive and predictable slam against free enterprise. Hmmm – reminds one of some of the themes in Ken Burns’s big PBS show on natural parks and the forces their backers overcame, esp. in Alaska. Except in this case the land, while fine western landscape, is nothing extraordinary. It’s nonetheless an opportuntiy to debate wide open range and forestland’s compatibility with drill rigs, pipelines, water discharge, and new roads carrying large trucks, about the roles of government’s many levels, and about the meaning of best use. Important, you bet. Still – one also bets the percentage of eyeballs that linger on this highly polished yarn is lower than those that go for the family whose water well blew up.
- Charlie Petit
