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The BeatCitizen journalists and citizen sAerial view of the cleanup of the remaining ash at the TVA KingstonFossil Plant in Tennessee. Photo courtesy TVA.By BILL DAWSONAmphibious trackhoes were used for clean-up operationsareas of the spill that were still too liquid to support lanvehicles. Photo courtesy TVA.Environmental issues related to coal ash, the voluminous toxicresidue that's left over when coal is burned, are nothing new toreporters in coal country. See the Inside Story interview with TimThornton, formerly of Virginia’s Roanoke Times, on page 20 of thisissue of SEJournal for one example.When a dam collapsed and a billion-gallon spill of liquefiedcoal ash in East Tennessee covered homes and farmland onDec. 22, 2008, local and regional news outlets immediatelyresponded. It took much of the national media a while longer,however, to acknowledge that such a huge environmental disasterwas a major national story — and then to begin exploring theevent’s implications.Media critics took note of how the coverage had followed thistrajectory, with growing recognition of the importance of the spillitself and its broader significance.On Jan. 5, Peter Dykstra, writing in his Media Mayhem blogfor Mother Nature Network (a.k.a. MNN.com), discerned a notabledifference between the slow start of some of Old Media’s nationaloutlets on the story and the nimble performance of New Media’sTwitter, facilitated by media consultant (and SEJ TipSheetcontributor) Amy Gahran. Here’s part of what Dykstra said:***Maybe it was the Christmas holidays, but the major U.S.media largely took a pass on the story. The New York Times didn’tshow up for 48 hours. National TV news outlets mostly ignored it,despite the appalling images of a community spending Christmasblanketed in a gray, soupy, toxic mess.Twitter was an odd exception. The social networking site wasabuzz with info from activists, journalists, scientists, and links toreports from regional media treating the story like the majorenvironmental disaster it was.With a 140-character limit on individual posts, Twitter lookslike a poor conduit for in-depth information. But you can fit justabout any URL in 140 characters. Twitter also has a simple, uniquefeature called a hashtag. Type in a key word preceded by the“#” in Twitter’s search function, and you’ll be taken to every Tweetthat includes the phrase— in this case, “#coalash.”Amy Gahran is a Boulder, CO media consultant who specializesin both online and environmental journalism. “I saw a big storythat I thought was interesting, and found almost nothing in thenational media,” she told me. Within a day or two, Gahran hadspearheaded a hashtag effort to bring all available info on the spillto a national audience of Twitterers. Other contributors includedRoaneViews, a news and info website for the community near theKingston power plant; the Knoxville News-Sentinel and NashvilleTennessean, two state dailies that have covered the story aggressively;and Jeffrey Levy, an EPA Web Information Officer,volunteered agency maps and stats on the facility.***On Feb. 20, Curtis Brainard, editor of Columbia JournalismReview's The Observatory blog on science and environmentalreporting, weighed in on the coal ash coverage with a lengthy postthat examined the expansion of media attention to include the16 SEJournal Spring 2009