SEJ Board Election

Lyndsey Gilpin
Active Board Candidate

My name is Lyndsey Gilpin and I am running for a seat on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists. I am a 27-year-old freelance environmental journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky.

My maternal grandmother was born in a tiny house in a holler near Greasy Creek in Pike County, Kentucky. She lived the typical Appalachian narrative, coming from a poor family, with a coal miner father and a childhood spent scrambling around the hills. My interest in her story was, by extension, an interest in Appalachia: the tangled storylines of people and coal companies they were so loyal to, the region’s never ending struggle with poverty, pollution and public health crises, the unique ecology of the rolling hills formed by glaciers so many millennia ago. I made the decision to become a journalist when I was 11 years old, after writing a memoir about my grandmother for the local newspaper.

Since then, I’ve traveled around the country working as an environmental reporter, discovering how best to combine my passions and ambitions while filling an information gap and informing a diverse audience. I am back home in the South now, reporting on ecological and environmental justice issues. As an SEJ board member, I will bring a fresh perspective to regional and national news, a digital-first approach to projects, and creativity to improve the rapidly changing world of environmental journalism.

After earning my master’s degree from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I worked as a technology reporter for TechRepublic/CBS Interactive, covering renewable energy and innovations in agriculture and food. In 2015, I left Kentucky to pursue a career in environmental journalism out West. I was offered an internship that quickly turned into a fellowship with High Country News in rural Paonia, Colorado. At HCN, a regional magazine that covers the American West, I learned from experienced journalists at a publication I’d long admired and reported on topics I care deeply about: water and agriculture, environmental justice and climate change, gender equality and diversity. I led an impactful year-long investigation detailing systemic sexual harassment in the National Park Service. The story was funded by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and was a 2017 Livingston Award finalist.

For years, I’ve seen a void in environmental journalism: climate change, environmental justice and energy stories in the South are often underreported, the region’s people and places often misrepresented. My passion and curiosity about the South led me to return to Kentucky this year. I launched a newsletter, Southerly, about ecological, cultural, and justice issues in this region. Each week, I write an editor’s note and curate the best longform journalism and news. I plan to add other Southern journalists’ work, including essays, investigative projects, narrative writing, video and photography. With hundreds of subscribers, I’ve garnered the attention of writers, photographers and editors, as well as diverse communities across the South. While working on this project, I am also a contributing editor for 100 Days in Appalachia. My freelance work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Washington Post, Outside, Undark, InsideClimate News, and Southeast Energy News.

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve incorporated social media and technology into every project, and am constantly working to deliver information to a diverse readership in new ways through interactive storytelling, social media and newsletters. I’m excited to collaborate with board members and SEJ members to amplify environmental reporting in places inside of the coasts, and work on investigative and in-depth projects at a time when government transparency is low and media criticism is high. After working in nonprofit media, I am also eager to learn about nonprofit governance, finances and budgeting.

It is when I am brainstorming, reporting and learning how to better this industry that I feel most creative, passionate and confident. As an SEJ board member, I will bring a fresh perspective as a young person in the South, while learning from other experienced and talented members. I’m eager to become more involved with the SEJ network, collaborate on projects and progress environmental journalism in an era when climate change is threatening people and landscapes everywhere — from large coastal cities, to communities in the Black Belt, to the hollers my grandmother came from in Appalachia.

lyndseygilpin.com
[email protected]
@lyndseygilpin

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