This is the 3rd in a series of articles by Knight Center students who attended the 2026 annual convention of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

By Iasmim Amiden dos Santos

Journalists covering environmental justice communities should focus on building long-term relationships, understanding historical context and recognizing community members as partners in knowledge production, speakers said during the Society of Environmental Journalists’ 35th annual conference in Chicago.

As climate change and other environmental crises continue to disproportionately affect low-income, Black, Brown and Indigenous communities across the United States, journalists at the conference discussed how newsrooms can improve trust with communities that have often felt misrepresented or ignored by the media.

The session, titled “Building Trust in Marginalized Communities,” focused on practical ways reporters can move beyond transactional reporting and produce stories that center on lived experiences while acknowledging systemic inequalities.

One approach highlighted during the discussion was bringing journalists and grassroots environmental justice advocates together outside the traditional reporting process to create space for dialogue and mutual understanding.

Nina Ignaczak, the founder and executive editor of Planet Detroit, described how her nonprofit newsroom partnered with the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources to convene climate justice advocates and journalists in September 2025.

According to Ignaczak, the initiative brought together 14 advocates and 14 journalists to design a set of principles for reporting on environmental justice communities. The conversations focused on accountability, context, vulnerability and resilience.

Ignaczak explained that the gathering was designed to create a non-transactional environment where journalists and advocates could openly discuss issues surrounding trust, media harm and newsroom constraints. The discussions also helped the advocates better understand the realities journalists work with, including tight deadlines, limited staffing and the pressures of digital publishing.

Sharing lessons from the project during the panel discussion, Ignaczak said relationship-building must become central to reporting practices.

“If there was one message throughout the whole thing, it was that you just have to build relationships,” Ignaczak said. “You just can’t do the thing of coming in and getting a quote and leaving without context.”

Ignaczak added that climate justice advocates repeatedly emphasized the importance of understanding the broader historical and political forces shaping environmental injustices in their communities. According to her, advocates explained that environmental problems affecting marginalized communities are rarely isolated and are instead connected to long-standing social, economic and political inequalities.

Without that broader context, Ignaczak said, reporting can unintentionally reinforce harmful narratives or oversimplify community experiences.

“There was really an enlightening on what harm can come out of that reporting without the full context,” Ignaczak said.

Speakers at the session noted that many communities adversely affected by pollution, flooding and extreme weather have experienced cycles of extractive journalism, where reporters briefly enter communities during moments of crisis and then disappear once their story is published. That pattern, panelists said, has contributed to distrust toward journalists and news organizations.

Ethan Bakuli, an independent journalist who collaborated on the project with Planet Detroit, said journalists should recognize that communities themselves hold valuable expertise and knowledge about environmental issues.

Bakuli said reporters covering environmental justice should move away from the idea that journalists alone are the primary authorities on a topic.

“We are not the authorities and we can learn a lot from the communities we are active in,” Bakuli said. “There’s a relationship going back and forth between the reporter and the actual community members, and we are mutually creating knowledge together.”

According to the speakers, acknowledging that dynamic can help journalists establish stronger trust with communities and produce more accurate and nuanced reporting.

Still, Ignaczak acknowledged that sustaining those relationships can be difficult for many news organizations, particularly in a rapidly changing media environment where reporters are expected to publish, post and broadcast stories quickly and continuously. She said shrinking newsroom budgets and the demands of digital journalism often leave little time for the kind of deep engagement required to build meaningful relationships with sources and communities.

Despite those challenges, Ignaczak said the principles developed during the September 2025 convening offer a framework journalists can continue striving toward.

The principles encouraged journalists to center the lived realities of impacted communities, resist false balance, rigorously fact-check information, approach sources with trauma sensitivity and view journalism as a catalyst for solutions rather than solely a mechanism for documenting problems.

The discussion reflected broader conversations across the conference about representation, accountability and trust as climate misinformation grows while environmental crises continue to disproportionately affect communities with fewer political and economic resources.

By centering community voices and investing in long-term relationships, Bakuli said journalists can produce reporting that better reflects the realities of people most affected by environmental crises.