Entries sought for Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism

Entries now are being accepted for an environmental journalism prize honoring James V. Risser, director emeritus of Stanford’s John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists, to be awarded this year for the first time.

The winner of the $3,000 Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism will come to campus to participate in a symposium on the issues reported in the winning entry. The deadline for entries is March 15. Entry forms and award details are available at http://risserprize.stanford.edu. The competition is open to print, broadcast and online journalists reporting on environmental issues in western Canada, Mexico and the United States for media organizations based in those nations.

Established by the Knight Fellowships program and the Center for the Study of the North American West, the prize is being offered in recognition of Risser’s journalism career and his leadership of the Knight Fellowships from 1985 until his retirement in 2000. Risser wrote frequently about environmental issues. He has had a particular interest in those issues as they affect the western United States.

Initial funding for the Risser Prize came from contributions from former Knight Fellows and others associated with the program.

In judging the awards, preference will be given to stories about environmental issues that are distinctively Western. The judges will place a premium on stories that explain complicated situations, stories that uncover undiscovered or covered-up problems and stories with ramifications beyond the immediate dimensions of the issue being covered.

Risser was a reporter for the Des Moines Register for 20 years and was its Washington bureau chief from 1976 to 1985. During that time he won numerous journalism honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting. His first Pulitzer, in 1976, was awarded for stories exposing corruption in the U.S. grain exporting industry, which led to criminal convictions and reform legislation. His second Pulitzer, in 1979, was awarded for a series of stories showing the destructive impact of modern American agriculture on the environment.

In 1985, Risser was named director of the Knight Fellowships program. As a member of the Stanford faculty, Risser also taught in the Department of Communication’s graduate journalism program.

In addition to his stories for the Register, he has written on environmental issues for a variety of newspapers and magazines, and he continues to write on news-media issues for journalism publications. He and his wife, Sandra Risser, live in Ashland, Ore.

The Knight Fellowships program annually brings 12 outstanding mid-career U.S. journalists and up to eight from other countries to study at Stanford in a one-year program. More than 700 journalists have studied at Stanford under the program since it began in 1966.

The Center for the Study of the North American West was established at Stanford in 2002. An interdisciplinary center dedicated to enriching Western scholarship, it brings together scholars, policy-makers, journalists, and civic leaders for new conversations about the past, present, and future of Western places—from Canada to Mexico, from the Great Plains to the Pacific Rim.

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