Ken Ward Jr. is a reporter at West Virginia's Charleston Gazette Mail, where since 1991,

he's been covering the coal, chemical, and natural gas industries and their impact on communities.

He's also a member of ProPublica's local reporting network, and this year, Ken was awarded a so-called

Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Ken, congratulations, and welcome to On the Media.

Thank you very much.

Let's go back 27 years ago. In most places, a young reporter gets assigned the coal beat, and the response might be,

Cole, really?

Got nothing in politics for me, maybe, or, I don't know, obits?

But in West Virginia, coal is or was king.

What was it like when you first got started covering that beat?

Well, my experience with coal goes back even a couple years before I started full time at the

Gazette. I did an internship in the summer of 1989, and that was the summer that the United

Mind Workers of America, the union was on strike against a company called Pitson Coal, and I got assigned to help cover the strike.

One of the jokes in the newsroom was that because I was an intern, I wasn't on the company health plan,

so if there was any trouble on the picket line, it would be okay.

But I spent that summer kind of driving around with a photographer, Jim Nolker, talking to coal miners on

picket lines and hearing their stories about what it was like to work underground and listening to

them talk about the struggles over decades and decades between miners and mine operators.

And it was just a fascinating sort of world that was new and different to me. And that was

kind of it for me. I knew that that's what I wanted to do. So you got labor disputes. You've got

worker health and safety, wages, environmental stuff. What else does the fossil fuels beat look like?

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