HEFN

The Food & Environment Reporting Network is the first and only independent, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that produces investigative reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health through publication partnerships with local and national media outlets. Through impartial, unbiased, outstanding reporting from experienced journalists, we seek to reveal corruption, abuse of power, and exploitation and to expose activities and subjects that the powerful work to keep hidden.

Its first story appeared in November 2011 in the award-winning western magazine, High Country News. The report takes a hard look at pollution by the powerful dairy industry in New Mexico and how one man became the driving force behind a movement that brought the state's mega-dairies to heel. The story can be found on www.thefern.org and hcn.org/milkandwater. Several more investigative stories commissioned by The Food and Environment Reporting Network will break news in 2012, appearing in mainstream publications, such as The American Prospect and The Nation magazines, as well as in major daily newspapers.

The Food and Environment Reporting Network experience in writing and publishing is represented by its Board of Directors, which includes Editor-in-Chief Samuel Fromartz, author, freelance journalist and a former Reuters business editor; Allison Arieff, a contributing columnist for The New York Times, contributing columnist for The Atlantic Cities, and editor of the Urbanist magazine for SPUR (San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association); and Ralph Loglisci, a leading food policy media strategist. Former board members Katrina Heron and Naomi Starkman were involved in the organization’s founding and development. Tom Laskawy is the Executive Director and manages the organization; Paula Crossfield serves as the Managing Editor. 

The Food and Environment Reporting Network’s editorial board includes Brian Halweil, editor of Edible East End and co-publisher of Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan magazines; Katrina Heron, Editor-at-Large at Newsweek/The Daily Beast and previously Editor-in-Chief of WIRED and a senior editor at The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times magazines; Ruth Reichl, Editorial Advisor to Gilt Taste, Editor-at-Large at Random House, and former Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet magazine; Elizabeth Royte, author of the critically acclaimed books, Garbage Land and Bottlemania; and Charles Wilson, co-author with Eric Schlosser of the number one New York Times children’s bestseller Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food.

A registered 501(c)3 non-profit corporation based in New York, the Food and Environment Reporting Network was founded in October 2009 and began operations in January 2011. It is funded by the generous support of the The 11th Hour Project, McKnight Foundation, Clarence Heller Foundation, Columbia Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.