Joan Meiners

Joan Meiners reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, and focuses on the consequences of growth in Cedar City. Meiners has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Florida, where she published multiple peer-reviewed scientific articles. As a journalist, she has written about the environment for Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Magazine, Orion Magazine and New Scientist Magazine. She spent 2019 as a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the oil and gas industry in southeast Louisiana for the ‘Polluter’s Paradise’ series, which won the Bayou Brief award for Louisiana’s Best Environment Reporting of 2019. The previous year, she got her start doing newspaper writing as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Before that, she produced data journalism for the award-winning series, ‘Peak Florida’ while still a graduate student.

The Spectrum

The Spectrum is a digital and daily print newsroom based in southwestern Utah and is the lone remaining daily print publication between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. We are a general news organization, with an emphasis on watchdog, government and environmental issues. We cover all of Washington County’s 17 municipalities and unincorporated areas, along with smaller communities and public lands spanning 25,000 square miles across parts of Utah, Arizona and Nevada.