a relatively new area of journalism. Not until the late 1950s did the environment and related terms enter the mass media lexicon as a way of labeling this new way of looking at humankind-habitat relationships. Although journalists began to cover environmental issues early in the 1950s in the U.S., environmental reporting was not recognized as a distinctive beat for a long time. As William Witt noted in his pioneering study of environmental reporters more than two decades ago, "Emerging beats such as the environmental beat might be expected to be particularly difficult to describe because they represent areas of rapid change. In fact, until they reach some general level of acceptance, one is never quite certain that they are distinct enough to warrant being treated as a separate beat."