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Leader Stories

Mayflower Oil Spill Gets National Attention

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Published August 30, 2013

In late June, the Arkansas Times and Inside Climate News set out to bring national press coverage to an underreported ExxonMobil oil spill in Mayflower, a small town just a few miles outside Little Rock, Ark. The duo launched the ioby campaign Muckraking the Mayflower Oil Spill and raised more than $26,000 in just three weeks. As the ioby campaign ended, the collaborators put two reporters on the ground in Mayflower, Sam Eifling and Elizabeth McGowan, one from each media outlet.

And now, five months after the oil spill, the story is finally getting well deserved national coverage. The story is being told daily on both the Arkansas Times and Inside Climate News. Because of their fantastic reporting, they have heightened national attention to the story, and it has been covered in the New York Times, on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, and last night, on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show.

On the show, Maddow recognized the excellent reporting that resulted from the ioby Muckraking campaign, saying, “If you ask me, I think the Arkansas Times should be considered for a Pulitzer for their excellent and indispensable coverage of the Mayflower oil spill.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Both the Arkansas Times and Inside Climate News have run feature length reports on the people affected by the spill, the scientific causes of the spill and the potential for something like this to happen again.