Ahearn joins Great Lakes Echo team

Louise Knott Ahern

Louise Knott Ahern, is a graduate of the MSU School of Journalism, has become an editor of Great Lakes Echo, the Knight Center’s award-winning regional environmental news service. In that role, she will work closely with and mentor student journalists who are on the Knight Center staff or taking our environmental reporting courses.

Ahearn spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter at the Lansing State Journal and Detroit News before transitioning into a full-time career as a bestselling novelist and freelance fiction editor.

 

She lives in Williamston, Michigan, with her family and a trio of spoiled pets.

 

Ittefaq joins Knight Center faculty

Muhammad Ittefaq

Muhammad Ittefaq, a new assistant professor of environmental communication, joined the Knight Center faculty this semester.

Ittefaq, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, is also affiliated with MSU’s Muslim Studies Program, and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Previously, he served as an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University.

His research focuses on global news coverage of health and environmental issues, science misinformation, AI’s impact on health and environment, and how different populations interpret scientific messages, make decisions related to health and climate and support policies related to science.

Ittefaq is also a host of the Science Talk podcast on YouTube and Instagram. Through this podcast, he shared the latest research and knowledge while fostering genuine, open conversations with experts, authors, policymakers, communicators and journalists about the environment, climate change, science and health. His outreach work aims to inform the broader public and enrich the information ecosystem. His Instagram content reaches 5–10 million people monthly.

In addition to researching, teaching and podcasting, Ittefaq’s public-facing writing has been published by a range of news media outlets, think tanks  and research organizations. He writes about climate justice, polio vaccination, misinformation, the air pollution crisis in South Asia, climate activism in the Global South and more.

 

Covering the environment at Michigan Public

Anna Barnes was an environmental reporting intern at NPR affiliate Michigan Public in collaboration with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

By Anna Barnes

As I wrap up my Knight Center summer internship at Michigan Public, I can say the experience was necessary and fulfilling. I am leaving the newsroom in Ann Arbor more prepared for my future career and for my last semester in the master’s program here at Michigan State University.

My internshipwas fully in-person and it showed me what a professional newsroom 9-5 experience is like. I went into the internship having no experience in radio and now I feel I could confidently work at any station. Some of my family and friends would call me just to tell me they just heard me talking through their car speakers, so that was definitely a highlight of the summer.

Working in the office also set me up for success in my last semester of college as my professional project will require me to spend hours in the office producing and editing a documentary. I am also no longer worried about audio editing because that’s one skill I got to focus on this summer. Continue reading →

What does Rapunzel have to do with environmental journalism?

Photo credit: Johnny Gruelle, 1922

A new paper by Knight Center researchers reaches back to a famous Grimm Brothers fairy tale to explain the importance of training environmental journalists how to report on academic studies.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel: Let Down Your Golden Hair: Using Study-to-Story to Bring Environmental Research Out of the Ivory Tower” describes how students affiliated with the center’s Great Lakes Echo news service find, analyze, contextualize, translate and report on scholarly studies for general audiences.

Much like Rapunzel, many environmental researchers are imprisoned — or, more precisely, their work is imprisoned — in metaphorical ivory towers known as scholarly journals. Most of them are peer-reviewed publications that lack the glitzy public relations apparatus of such prominent and media-savvy mainstream journals as Science, Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Most environment-related studies that Great Lakes Echo reports about appear in smaller and niche journals that few, if any other reporting usually look at. That gives our stories the impact and prominence of exclusivity because we are usually the first news organization to cover them.

The paper by Knight Center director Eric Freedman, graduate research assistant Julia Belden and undergrad research assistants Victoria Witke and Isabella Figueroa Noguira was presented at the August conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communications in New Orleans.

Julia Belden presenting the Rapunzel paper.

The authors say that the Great Lakes Echo model can be adapted by other journalism programs to encourage student reporting that draws on environmental research.