By Eric Freedman
The Knight Center is awarding $2,000 grants to four Michigan high schools for collaboration between their journalism and environmental science classes.
The winning projects were selected in the center’s third statewide competition.
The Knight Center also matches the schools with professional journalism mentors to work with the students and teachers for guidance and advice on the projects. Continue reading
The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism has awarded two $3,500 documentary grants to MSU faculty-student teams.
The winning projects were chosen from proposals submitted in a campus-wide competition:
In addition to public dissemination of the projects, the Knight Center will use the documentaries on its website and for presentation in classes, workshops and other center activities.
This is the fourth year of the center’s grant competition.
Knight Center director Eric Freedman’s study of dangers facing environmental journalists was recognized as a Top Faculty Paper at the 2018 Association for Journalism & Mass Communications annual conference.
The award came from the organization’s Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Division.
For the study, “In the Crosshairs: The Perils of Environmental Journalism,” Freedman interviewed journalists from five continents who had been arrested, interrogated, sued, harassed, physically assaulted or threatened for their coverage. It explored the impact of such situations, including the psychological effects on these journalists’ sense of mission and professional practices.
Freedman said environmental journalists around the globe are at heightened risk because environmental controversies often involve influential business and economic interests, political power battles, criminal activities, and corruption, as well as politically, culturally, and economically sensitive issues concerning indigenous rights to land and natural resources.
Haley Walker
Knight Center alum Haley Walker recently joined the Oregon Environmental Council‘s Emerging Leaders Board.
The council’s advisory board of “entrepreneurs, strategist, community leaders and visionaries under the age of 40 have agreed to share their extraordinary skills to support the mission of Oregon Environmental Council.”
Walker, who graduated from the Knight Center in December of 2010, is the senior communications director with The Freshwater Trust, the oldest wild fish conservation group in the Pacific Northwest.
While at MSU she wrote for the Knight Center’s award-winning EJ Magazine and was an early reporter for the center’s Great Lakes Echo environmental news service. The stories she covered for those publications were as diverse as climate change in national parks and gardens maintained by prison inmates and confessing to spending half her income on organic food.
As a student she was part of an award-winning team recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists for a series of stories about water quality problems at public pools. The Knight Center awarded her the Edward J. Meeman Service Award in 2010.