The David Stolberg Meritorious Service Award recognizes an SEJ member for their exceptional volunteer work. Nominees may not be a board member or anyone who is paid by SEJ.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of this organization. Member-volunteers organize tours and panels for the conference, implement the awards program, contribute to the SEJournal, serve as mentors and sit on any number of committees. This conference could not happen and SEJ could not be successful without our members lending their time and sweat in selfless service as volunteers.
This annual award honors exceptional volunteer work by an SEJ member. It was created by the SEJ board in 1998 and named in honor of one of SEJ's founders, David Stolberg.
This year’s recipient served on the SEJ board for more than a decade beginning in 1997 and served as SEJ president from 2000 to 2002. Since stepping off the board in 2010, he served as co-chair of the SEJ Awards Committee. As co-chair, he spent countless hours seeking awards judges, re-writing awards category descriptions and refining one of SEJ’s signature programs.
Over the last two years, he has served as SEJ’s future conference sites chair, pitching our conferences to universities and serving as our initial conference funding and logistics negotiator with potential hosts. It’s partly because of his hard work that SEJ’s conferences land where they do.
I think of this year’s recipient as Mr. SEJ, one of our longtime members synonymous with SEJ and environmental journalism. You’ll see him around leading tours, moderating panels and serving as gatekeeper for SEJ’s Facebook page.
He’s a reporter for InsideClimate News and previously covered the environment for about 18 years at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky.
It’s my distinct honor to give this year’s Stolberg award to Jim Bruggers.
This annual award honors exceptional volunteer work by an SEJ member. It was created by the SEJ board in 1998 and named in honor of SEJ founder David Stolberg. Nominees may not be a board member or anyone who is paid by SEJ.
Much of SEJ's best work is accomplished by member-volunteers: tour and panel organizers for the conference, awards program leaders, contributors to SEJournal, SEJ-talk and www.sej.org, freedom-of-information watchdogs, mentors, and leaders in diversity outreach. Volunteers define the heart and soul of SEJ, and they expand the group's reach and significance in ways that are not easily measured.
David Stolberg had a 38-year career with Scripps Howard that included duties for the Scripps Howard Foundation's annual Meeman Awards for excellence in environmental reporting. Stolberg always believed in "the value of networking, of the subliminal training that comes from an association with one's peers." In the 1980s, when Stolberg was assistant general editorial manager of Scripps Howard, he came up with the SEJ idea and kept suggesting it to Meeman winners until he found one who was willing to put in the volunteer time to organize with other journalists and make something happen. That person was SEJ's founding president, Jim Detjen.
Stolberg died May 24, 2011 at age 83.
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