Category Archives: Eric Freedman

Eric Freedman is the director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism

Mongabay Latam Program Director Visits MSU to Share Lessons in Environmental Journalism

By Shealyn Paulis

Michigan State University welcomed environmental journalist and Mongabay Latam Program Director Maria Isabel Torres during Oct. 13-15, 2026. Torres was invited by Professor Bruno Takahashi to deliver the Mary Gardner Endowed Lecture, which focuses on Latin American journalism, and to engage with faculty and students. The  visit was co-sponsored by MSU’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the School of Journalism.

Maria Isabel Torres, left, poses with Bruno Takahashi. (Photo by Chris Kohler)

Torres, a journalist from Peru, has been with Mongabay Latam as program director since the bureau’s inception a decade ago. Prior to this, she worked as an investigative journalist for multiple news outlets in Peru.

Latin America was named the most dangerous region in the world for environmental defenders by Global Witness in 2023, with one third of those murdered being Indigenous people. Similarly, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) tracks that Latin America records the most journalist killings outside of active war zones.

“Bruno’s work is really interesting because he is approaching that reality with different perspectives, talking about the coloniality in communication,” Torres said.

Torres, meets with Shawn Turner, interim director of Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. (Photo by Anna Barnes)

Her visit began with a lunch for students of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences. Torres shared her experiences as a reporter and learned about students’ academic projects and future goals.

Torres shares stories over lunch with students and faculty. (Photo by Anna Barnes)

A highlight of Torres’ visit was the Mary Gardner Endowed Lecture. She emphasized the collaboration, originality and precautions required in her work and discussed examples of investigative projects her team has produced. Torres shared the trials and tribulations faced by Mongabay Latam journalists, as well as the accomplishments she is most proud of.

“We are pretty happy that we’ve been, for 10 years, covering the most important problems and solutions about the environment in Latin America,” Torres said. She emphasized that her team is proud of its successes. “That gives me, as a journalist, the idea that sometimes our job can have an impact in real life,” she said.

Torres said she measures success by impact rather than story popularity or website traffic. Achieving that impact, she explained, also requires adapting to changing news consumption habits.

Torres speaks about environmental journalism in Latin America during the Mary Gardner Endowed Lecture. (Photo by Chris Kohler)

“We have to acknowledge that the news consumption has changed, has shifted, and that young people, for example, read the news from social media and don’t go to the websites,” Torres said. “You wrote this story because you think it’s important for the audience. So, you have to meet the audience where they are.”

She shared details of a long-term, collaborative investigation conducted by her outlet that exposed 67 illegal drug trafficking airstrips across Indigenous territories in the Peruvian Amazon. The project required years of precise investigation and coordination, bringing international attention to the Indigenous communities affected by these illegal activities and the 15 Indigenous leaders who were killed defending their territories against drug traffickers.

Students and staff during the presentation by Maria Isabel Torres. (Photo by Chris Kohler)

Despite the dangerous realities of her work, Torres also shared some of the more creative and experimental stories Mongabay Latam has explored. They recently produced an interactive theatrical play, performed by her staff, depicting the investigation into the illegal airstrips. She hopes projects like this inspire young journalists to experiment with new formats to make serious news more accessible to modern audiences.

Throughout her visit, Torres offered the MSU community an insight into the challenges and opportunities of environmental reporting in Latin America and the importance of investigative journalism. Her experiences demonstrated that journalistic success is strengthened by collaboration, can be measured by impact and can help vulnerable communities.

Attacks on individual U.S. journalists are escalating, Knight Center director says

In today’s overheated political environment, individual journalists find themselves targets of aggressive criticism, slurs, insults and threats of violence, verbal attacks that go beyond the traditional criticism of news organizations by people unhappy with what the report.

Knight Center director Eric Freedman examines this deeply troubling trend in a column for Capital News Service.

 

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.

 

Knight Center grant supports invasive plants coverage

A Knight Center grant supporting coverage of environmental problems on the campus of an Ann Arbor high school has prodcued a new in-depth article on invasive plants.

Dominic Marroni, a student at Skyline High School, wrote the story, “Invasives and Oak Wilt Threaten Skyline Natural Areas, Adjacent Neighborhoods.”

Phragmities in between the baseball field and the tennis courts at Skyline High School in Ann Abror. Credit: Dominic Marroni.

Skyline’s reporting project received financial support from a Knight Center program that encourages collaboration between journalism and environmental science courses in high schools across Michigan.