This year, the MTPR news team began surveys to help inform our reporting beats. For MTPR’s Ellis Julin, that’s the environment, which can cover quite a lot. She reached out to listeners to find out what they wanted to hear more about and sat down with host Austin Amestoy to share what she learned.

Austin Amestoy Hey, Ellis. I rememberhearing you once or twice maybe three times on Morning Edition asking folks to fill out your survey so, remind us what this was all about.

Ellis Juhlin You know, I really only came on just a handful of times, so you probably don’t even hardly remember, but this is a form of listener outreach. If you’ve tuned into MTPR anytime over the last week, you know that we are a community service and we pride ourselves on reporting that matters to our community. So I decided to tap our listeners and get their input on what they’d like to see from our environmental reporting. I’m one person covering a massive area. And so I tapped into our network all across the western half of the state.

Austin Amestoy How did it go?

Ellis Juhlin It went great. It went even better than I could have expected. I got over 130 replies from 17 counties across our listening area. And I just want to say thank you to everybody who filled it out and to the people who directly emailed me when they saw that this survey was going on. It means so much and I can’t do this without you. I got to connect with so many of our listeners and people interested in the things I cover, which was really cool. Like this question from one of our Missoula-based listeners, Alison Reintjes about the environmental and human health harms of pesticide use.

Alison Reintjes It popped up and I was like, I’m definitely filling that out because I regularly listen to public radio and I often feel like this is a story that’s missing or not told in a very good way, because there are times when pesticide use or parks comes up, but it often misses the points I think should be included.

Ellis Juhlin She also told me about work being done right now by the city of Missoula to stop using pesticides in parks. And really from this survey, I got so many new ideas and was also reminded of certain topics within this really broad subject that is the environment that people wanna hear more about.

Austin Amestoy Right, so let’s talk about those a little bit. What else might we expect to hear from your reporting now because of the survey?

Ellis Juhlin So I got responses that were broad and really specific, but there were definitely some common themes that emerged in this. There’s a lot of interest in water and what’s going on with water in the state. Also with wildlife and all of the critters that people care so much about. And then climate change. How is our climate changing and how are we adapting to that?

Austin Amestoy So now that you have these ideas, Ellis, you’ve connected with sources, some of our listeners, what will your work from here look like because of the survey?

Ellis Juhlin So I really see this as kind of a roadmap for helping me prioritize what I’m covering. What do the majority of responses have in common and how am I focusing on those subjects in my stories? And I’ve already used it to inform some of my recent reporting. There were a lot of questions in the survey about how federal policies are playing out on the ground here in Montana. I recently did a story on what executive orders could mean for our timber industry. And I also recently followed a bill through the Legislature about funding wildlife crossings in response to some of those questions.

Austin Amestoy Well, fabulous. And if listeners want to keep up with the reporting that you’re doing because of this survey, what’s going to be the best way for them to do that?

Ellis Juhlin All the stories that I report on using information or sources or subjects from this survey are gonna have a special tag on our website. This is a key word or phrase you can find at the end of our stories and click on it to see everything that came out of that survey. The tag will be MTPR Environmental Survey. And thanks to the success that this survey has had, other members of the news team are gonna be carrying out similar efforts too. Our newest reporter, Victoria Traxler, who covers rural communities has hers up right now. So take a moment to fill that out too. and you can always contact any of our reporting team directly through the website.

Austin Amestoy I am definitely looking forward to my turn on the education beat, to be honest, Ellis. Thank you for leading the way on this, and we will look forward to more great reporting from you.

Ellis Juhlin Thanks Austin, and thanks to our listeners. This is MTPR.