Ken Ward, Jr.
kward@wvgazette.com
Ken Ward, Jr., a reporter for The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, is a native of Mineral County, W.Va., and a graduate of West Virginia University. Since starting at the Gazette in 1991, Ward, 41, has received numerous regional and national reporting awards for his coverage of strip mining, pulp mills, timbering and medical waste incinerators. Read his stories on mountaintop removal here or follow him on his Coal Tattoo blog or Twitter at http://twitter.com/Kenwardjr.
Ward is a three-time winner of the Scripps Howard Foundation's Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting and in 2000 received the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Ward is also chairman of the Society of Environmental Journalists' First Amendment Task Force.
Mine safety has been part of his beat during most of his 16 years at the Gazette. He covered the Sago and Darby Mine disasters and the Aracoma Mine fire in 2006, and later that year spent six months researching coal mine issues as an Alicia Patterson Fellow. The resulting series, Beyond Sago,
received an Investigative Reporters and Editors medal.
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Contributions
Why is it OK for the coal industry to break the law?
ASK THIS | August 10, 2007
Often after accidents like the one at Crandall Canyon, Utah, mine operators claim their mines had relatively few violations. Even if that's true -- and often it isn't -- 'relatively few' just isn’t good enough in a risky venture like coal mining, says Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward, Jr. 
Why are Tennessee residents buried in coal ash?
ASK THIS | December 30, 2008
West Virginia reporter Ken Ward, Jr., an expert on the coal industry, says some good reporting has been done on the Dec. 22 TVA dam break, but a lot more needs to be done—including following the paper trail to find out why the dam broke in the first place.
Mining the coal beat: Keeping watch over an 'outlaw' industry
SHOWCASE | June 07, 2009
In its Summer 2009 issue, Nieman Reports continues to focus on investigative reporting. In one piece, Ken Ward, Jr., a leading writer on the coal industry, explains how a coal firm reported, on its own, that it violated water pollution limits 4,500 times over a 5-year period—and how, in response, regulators did absolutely nothing. Nada. (From Nieman Reports.)
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If voters are to go into the midterm elections with any understanding at all, the press needs to get away from he-said, she-said reporting and look into the positions that candidates and the two parties are taking. Martin Lobel offers some vital questions. 
Our correspondent in Australia has ideas on how to improve things a little. But he’s not optimistic that anyone on Capitol Hill will be interested.
Columnist and author Steven Greenhut looks at the ongoing pension issue, including abuses of it, and deals with some of the key questions.
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Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears [...] 
(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.)
The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so.
The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly on the [...]
I got this note from a friend and colleague a little while after Roger Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury on Aug. 19th:
“And meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, CIA officials and others who lied to Congress in sworn testimony about Iraq go free. If we can ‘look forward, not backward’ on torture, perjury, [...]
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(Nieman Watchdog)
Telecoms charging more to do nothing
It's getting more expensive to have an unlisted phone number. What's the logic behind that?
(Center for Media and Democracy)
Prosecute those leaks
The Obama administration has indicted another alleged leaker, this time for reportedly passing along to Fox News an intelligence assessment that North Korea was likely to respond to U.N. sanctions by conducting another nuclear test.
(Secrecy News/Federation of American Scientists)
A broad array of massive financial crimes
As PRWatch.org shows, court-imposed settlements have only skimmed the surface of big banks' wrongdoing in the financial crisis.
(Center for Media and Democracy)
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