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  The New Paper 15 Jun 07
Teh Jen Lee: The New Paper's environment reporter is celebrity guest on TV show about S'pore's water

HER passion and expertise have earned her a spot on a prime-time television programme. By Yvonne Poon

The New Paper's Miss Teh Jen Lee was invited to appear on a new MediaCorp variety show - The ABCs of Water, an eight-part series hosted by Quan Yi Feng and Dasmond Koh.

It made its debut last night on Channel8. Sponsored by the Public Utilities Board (PUB), the programme aims to raise awareness about PUB's active, beautiful, clean waters programme. Others present on last night's episode were local artistes Felicia Chin, Kym Ng and Chen Liping.

Miss Teh, who has been with The New Paper since 2002, has a keen interest in environment matters. Her reports on the environment such as the one on Sungei Api Api and the paint that tainted the waterway, as well as the coral habitat on Sentosa have made a big impact.

She also went on a scuba-diving expedition to Cambodia and Sabah in 2003 and 2004 to survey coral reefs.

The 28-year-old graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with honours in conservation and resource studies.

She was runner-up for the Best Local Journalist Award at the Society of Publishers in Asia awards in 2005. The winning report was on how she helped more than 70 residents, or almost the whole of population of Pulau Ubin, get their fair allocation of Economic Restructuring Shares.

Miss Teh gave the thumbs up to PUB's public outreach effort.

She said: 'A lot of people take Singapore's waterways for granted. They don't think about what happens when the drains lead out to the sea. So they don't think that littering in drains is a big deal.

'The show helps to highlight that our canals and drains are not in isolation, that the water draining there actually goes somewhere.'

The programme features a segment in each episode where the celebrity guests have to guess which one of three studio guests is the real McCoy - the one involved with water in some way.

Miss Teh, who was the real environment reporter on the show, helped two other decoy 'reporters' disguise themselves by giving them information about the reports she had done.

She said: 'It was fun to share my experiences in environmental reporting with the other two 'fake' reporters.'

She primed her counterparts so well that the celebrities mistakenly thought they were the real reporters.

She said with a laugh: 'I wore all green to make it seem too obvious and to throw (the celebrities) off. They actually said that they didn't pick me because I looked too much like a real reporter.'

Fun aside, Miss Teh did feel that the show had an important message.

She said: 'The Government does a lot to keep our environment clean, but because of that, people get complacent and thoughtless. 'This programme will show people the impact of their actions - the very thing that I want to do as an environmental reporter.'

The ABCs of Water is aired every Wednesday at 8.30pm on Channel 8.
links
More about Jen Lee on the NDP moblog

Related articles on Singapore: general environmental issues
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