Grantee Profiles
< profile listResource Media: Identifying the messengers...reframing the issues
Web site: http://www.resource-media.org
Resource Media is a nonprofit organization that specializes in strategic communications and media outreach designed to improve coverage of environmental and public health issues.
When the Bush administration backed off on plans to drill for oil and gas along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front just one month before the 2004 presidential election, it supposedly wasn't because of protests from traditional environmental groups. As an article in the October 6 Washington Post reported, Bush had also received significant pressure from the "hook and bullet crowd" -- members of groups like the Boone and Crocket Club that include wealthy sportspeople who might otherwise have supported the president. Said Rebecca W. Watson, Assistant Interior Secretary for land and minerals management, "We listen when they talk to us."
"We went looking for new voices, allied voices that would get the attention of President Bush," explains Scott Miller, co-director of Resource Media. "It took a lot of long, hard work to in order to get there, but I think we can repeat it in bigger and smaller ways."
Miller is a 23-year veteran of television journalism. Fifteen of those years he spent covering the environment for KING 5-TV in Seattle. Since November 2002 he has served at Resource Media, with the mission of improving coverage of environmental and public health issues. For Miller and the rest of the Resource Media team, better coverage isn't just about the number of hits. "We really believe in the reporting," he says. "It's about quality, not just quantity."
The Seattle-based organization, founded in 1998, has offices in five Western states and a staff of experts that, in Miller's words, "have been around the block a few times." Funding from places like the Brainerd Foundation (which gave original seed funding for Resource Media) means conservation groups have access to highly skilled people they may not be able to afford otherwise.
Resource Media puts special emphasis on finding voices that represent a broader swath of the public. Too often, he says, environmentalists are perceived as overly strident, or their arguments come across as self-serving. Miller points to the "jobs versus environment" debate. There is an economic rationale for environmental protection, he says, but the audience is much more likely to consider it seriously if the messenger is a local business leader.
Finding new spokespeople is tough work, he says. "You have to have intermediaries." On the Rocky Mountain Front campaign, for example, Trout Unlimited was a key intermediary that provided access to hunters and anglers. He adds, "It is important to be persistent, and you have to collect names as if they were gold."
Resource Media also stresses "value-based" messages. "It is helpful to describe the environmental issues we work on in a way that reflects public values. We have to describe what we do so that members of others constituencies understand how the environmental degradation affects them." That means knowing your audience and knowing what your audience cares about, Miller says. "Messages have to be carefully vetted and tested. We need to do a much better job of testing our assumptions about audience."
Profiled 2005