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.