Category Archives: Eric Freedman

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

Painting extinction

Image: Laura Ball

By Eric Freedman
The Chelsea neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan has changed considerably since I lived in New York City. Well-maintained brownstones. Cafes and bistros. Lots of bikes. Bumper stickers opposed to fracking and climate change. Recycling bins. Even a sign by a corner park about an upcoming post-Halloween pumpkin composting site.
Chic has replaced cheesy. Upscale has supplanted rundown.
So Chelsea wasn’t an unlikely neighborhood for me to find extinction, or at least San Diego artist Laura Ball’s homage in watercolor to species in jeopardy of extinction.
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Knight Center director, colleague present study on environmental journalism in Kyrgyzstan

The study examined Kyrgyzstan’s most popular Russian-language online news site is 24.kg.

By Eric Freedman
There’s a dramatic disconnect between the environmental topics covered by two major news organizations and Kyrgyzstan and the issues that environmental nongovernmental organizations- – eco-NGOs – in the country feel are most important.
In addition, those eco-NGOs do a poor job reaching out to the media for coverage of their activities and those underreported environmental issues, meaning they have little influence on building the public policy agenda for the media, the public or government.
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Risk and resilience in the Great Lakes Basin

Eric Freedman

By Eric Freedman
Nine years after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and four years after the BP Deepwater oil spill, the mega-topic was risk and resilience when about 700 environmental journalists, scientists and professional communicators from the United States and abroad gathered in New Orleans earlier this month.

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Get off your butt and report

Members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, wearing floatation vests for safety, interview a Texas Brine representative at the site of the sinkhole. Image: Eric Freedman

By Eric Freedman
The easy thing for you as a journalist is to phone a few experts and bureaucrats, do some Internet research for background and write a news story or feature about the mega-sinkhole sinkhole near the tiny southern Louisiana community of Bayou Corne.
Or you as a journalist could get off your butt, step away from the computer screen, tuck your cellphone into your pocket and see it up close and personal.
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