Tap Talk Season 7 is here! Today, we bring you a conversation with Michael Phillis, a water & environment reporter for the Associated Press. Michael tells Jennifer & Steve about how he got into environmental reporting, the importance and range of stories about water, and the experience of reporting the recent long-form investigation “A crisis emerges across the US as ‘forever chemicals’ quietly contaminate drinking water wells” with his colleague Helen Wieffering. This story centers the well contamination crisis in Stella, Wisconsin, a town of ~600 people in northern Wisconsin, where some well water tests have found PFAS concentration levels of 375 times the federal limit for drinking water connected to a nearby paper mill.
Topics Discussed
- Meet Michael Phillis
- Michael’s Water Hero:
- Isabel Wilkerson: Journalist, author (The Warmth of Other Suns; Caste), and recipient of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her coverage in The New York Times of the Great Flood of 1993.
- How Michael got into environmental reporting
- How close is it necessary to get with sources in these stories? Does that change a journalist’s perspective on quality of life in the United States?
- The takeaways that more people should understand about water and health in the US
- What’s the process of reporting and publishing both daily stories and investigations like the PFAS/well contamination story?
- Advice for scientific experts that are nervous about speaking to journalists
- How the PFAS issue compares to other water contaminants like lead and pesticides
- Has the public response to reporting on water/environment/health issues evolved?
- The importance of the public reading and understanding this reporting
- Connect with Michael
- Reporting at the AP
- LinkedIn | X/Twitter
- Contact him via email or Signal
- Connect with the Associated Press
“If PFAS really is everywhere, it’s really difficult to get it cleaned up fully. People don’t know what to do. It’s going to take years for the town of Stella to deal with the problems they have, and they’re not sure exactly how good it’s going to be at the end of it all.”Michael Phillis
Go Further
You’re invited to discuss the episode in our LinkedIn Group. If you decide to share on Twitter, please use the hashtag #TapTalkPodcast. And, of course, make sure to subscribe in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
About the Guest
Michael Phillis is a reporter with the Associated Press covering the environment with a focus on water. He has been with the AP since 2021, and in 15 years of reporting he has lived in six different cities and written for publications including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, PhillyVoice, the Los Angeles Times, Law360, and more. Major stories that Michael has reported for the AP have covered well contamination from climate-driven flooding, radioactive waste in St. Louis left from the development of atomic weapons, the lawsuits against BP by workers who cleaned up the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the loss of funding for sewer upgrades in poor communities across the US.
Michael holds BBA and BS degrees in marketing and journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MS in journalism from Columbia University.