Reporting From the Blue — An Ocean of Opportunities

He has run out of air 80 feet down in Fiji, been held at gunpoint on a beach in El Salvador, and flown with the Coast Guard over a Gulf oil slick where dolphins were dying. Now David Helvarg is making a case to his fellow reporters in SEJournal: the ocean is the most under-covered beat on the planet, and he’d welcome the competition. He traces his path from war correspondent to full-time “blue beat” journalist, credits the reporters and nonprofits who have raised the quality of ocean journalism, and calls out the outlets cutting back their ocean and climate coverage. His advice to young ocean journalists is to follow their passion for at least five years, because there is no shortage of stories: salmon showing up in the Arctic, krill declining in the Antarctic, a global kelp forest crisis, marine heat waves, eDNA, deep-sea mining, and geopolitical flashpoints from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf.