Build Your Professional Portfolio!
Spring 2014 Courses Open to All Majors—
Enrollment Limited

JRN 472/872: Environmental Reporting Lab – Skulls & Crossbones—Reporting on Hazardous Waste, Nuclear Radiation, Toxic Chemicals and Invasive Species in the Great Lakes
Cover hot-button issues including leaking dump sites, nuclear power plants, pesticide run-off, alien animals and plants, air and water pollution, environmental health hazards, animal diseases and more for Great Lakes Echo, our online environmental news service. Opportunities available for text, photo, video, audio and social media reporting
3 credits: Tuesday & Thursday 4:10-5:30 p.m.
To waive prerequisites, contact Eric Freedman
(freedma5@msu.edu, 355-4729)

JRN 420: Capital News Service
Report on state government, politics and public
policy for more than 30 newspapers and online news outlets across Michigan that belong to Capital News Service. Education, public health, civil rights, environment, economic development, transportation, agriculture, urban and rural policy, criminal justice, taxes and more…
4 credits: Monday, Wednesday & Friday mornings
For instructor permission to register, contact
Dave Poulson (poulson@msu.edu, 432-5417)

By Eric Freedman
The rapidly changing face of journalism writ large is also the changing face of environmental and science journalism.
These are despairingly dark days of continued newsroom downsizing, the disappearance of long-established news outlets and reduced environmental coverage by those news outlets that survive.
Thus it was no surprise that the challenges of freelancing were high on the agenda at last week’s annual Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference, Time after time, someone stood up during a Q&A period and began, “I’m a freelancer from…” before asking a question to speakers or panelists. Continue reading →

Cool water pooled in the space between the small of my back and my wetsuit as I drifted face down in Tennessee’s Tellico River.
The minor discomfort was forgotten as a dark-striped fish with a bright orange belly erupted from a hole in the rocky river bottom below.
Pat Rakes, co-director of Conservation Fisheries, Inc. in Knoxville, spit out his snorkel and gleefully sang out, “A tangerine darter, two of them.”
Indeed, there were – and more. A school of Tennessee shiners appeared with bright
Continue reading →