Williams, the company in charge of the construction of the Atlantic Sunrise expansion, currently has pipelines that run along the east coast from New York to Georgia. The controversy that exists now with the company is the proposed expansion into northeastern Pennsylvania. Lancaster County, specifically, has been against the project.
On February 21, 2014, Lancaster Online journalist Tim Stuhldreher wrote about the new proposal announced by Williams. The article, titled “Proposed Marcellus gas pipeline would run through Lancaster,” laid out the path of the pipeline throughout Pennsylvania. However, it did not include anything that localized the story to those in Lancaster except for a brief statement from Lancaster County Commissioner Scott Martin (Stuhldreher 2015). The article was a balanced piece written with all the necessary information for the people without a local focus.
The pipeline is still a controversy in Lancaster County and the people are skeptical of the progress reports that Williams is making. On November 10, 2015, Lancaster Online journalist Ad Crable wrote about the economic implications in an article titled “Energy analyst says Atlantic Sunrise pipeline not good for the public good.” In the article, Crable focused on energy analyst Dennis Witmer, who said that he is a big supporter of natural gas but not of what long-term negative effects the pipeline would have (Crable 2015). Although the story was focused on Witmer, Crable included input from an employee of one of the largest users of Atlantic Sunrise gas, thus balancing the story and staying unbiased.
Just like the two newspapers covering the Keystone XL pipeline, the editorials in the Lancaster Online are overwhelmingly negative, with ten of the first opinion pieces being slanted in that direction. The headlines are also slanted negatively including one titled “Not so fast, Williams Partners.” These editorials demonstrate the public’s opinions on the matter and match up with the negative letters to the editor the newspaper also received (Lancaster Online 2014).