Category Archives: Eric Freedman

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

Open call for 2022 proposals for high school journalism and environmental science collaborations

To encourage collaboration between high school journalism and environmental science classes, we invite teachers to submit proposals for innovative class projects in which journalism students will report about field research by environmental science students. Our principal goals are:

to help young prospective journalists better understand and explain to the public how science is done
to help environmental science students learn to use the media to explain their work to the public.
To promote environmental and science journalism.

The Knight Center intends to award 1-year grants of $2,000 to up to 3 high schools: $1,000 to the journalism program and $1,000 to the environmental science program for equipment, software or scholarships. In addition, the Knight Center will pair each school with a professional journalist to serve as a mentor to participating students and teachers.

Here are the details:

Your proposal must include a project description (750 words maximum), the names and contact information for a partnering journalism and environmental science teacher from the same high school; grade levels of participating classes; and the estimated number of students in the participating classes. A proposal form is attached.
Your projects must generate student-produced news or feature stories with visuals (photos and/or graphics) for print, online, audio and/or video that your school will disseminate. The Knight Center will also disseminate these stories to the public through our website, and some stories may be posted on Great Lakes Echo (greatlakesecho.org), the center’s award-winning online regional environmental news service.
Grantees must comply with MSU financial reporting procedures.
Grantees (students, teachers and professional mentors) will be invited to a one-day workshop at MSU in Fall 2022.
Application deadline: November 29, 2021. Awards will be announced by January 14, 2022. Projects should begin in March 2022 and be completed with a final report by the end of December 2022.
Read about the successful 2018-2019 grantees at https://knightcenter.jrn.msu.edu/2019/03/06/four-high-schools-win-journalism-environmental-science-grants-from-the-knight-center/

Send along a Grant Application Cover Sheet with the following information:

School name and address
Participating journalism teacher (name, email, phone)
Participating environmental science teacher (name, email, phone)
Project description (750 words maximum): What do you intend to do (scientific research
and journalistic coverage) and how? What are your goals for the project? How will you
assess accomplishments?
Titles and grade levels of participating classes:
- Journalism:
- Environmental science
Name, title, email and phone of administrator authorizing submission of the proposal:

Submit by November 29^th to Barb Miller at mille384@msu.edu

If you have questions, email Eric Freedman at freedma5@msu.edu

Knight Center Documentary Grant competition

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The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism will award up to 3 grants of $3,500 each to support the making of environment-related documentaries (video, audio or other digital media) by MSU faculty-student teams.

Here are the essentials

Deadline for submission: November 29, 2021, at 5 p.m.
Decisions to be announced approximately January 14, 2022.
Open to faculty and students from all departments at MSU.
Maximum award: $3,500 for 1 year.

These must be documentaries, not public service announcements or advocacy pieces.
The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism must be credited for underwriting the project.
The Knight Center will be entitled to use your documentary, including linking on our website and presentation in classes, workshops and other activities.
Allowable expenses include travel, essential equipment, supplies, pay for students and festival & competition entry fees. All expenditures must comply with MSU procedures and rules. Any equipment purchased remains the property of MSU. Grant funds must be expended with one year from the date of approval by MSU Contracts and Grants.

What to Submit:

Working title
• Medium: video, audio or other digital media
• Project summary (200 words maximum): What compelling story will you tell?
• Estimated timeline (Be realistic)
• Most likely audiences: Whom do you expect to watch or listen to it?
• For video & audio documentaries, what length do you expect the final version to be?
• Distribution plans: How will you disseminate your product?
• Budget plan: How do you plan to spend the money?
• Team members:
• Faculty: name, rank and department or school and project role, with abbreviated CV
• Students: name, year, major and project role, with resume
• Potential problems and obstacles
• Links to any relevant projects by team members or bring a CD to the Knight Center office at 382 Com Arts Building by the deadline

Email questions to Eric Freedman, Director, freedma5@msu.edu
Email submissions to Barbara Miller, mille384@msu.edu

New endangered species book from Knight Center director

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Knight Center director Eric Freedman is the lead editor of Communicating Endangered Species: Extinction, News, and Public Policy, a new multidisciplinary environmental communication book that takes a distinctive approach by connecting how media and culture depict and explain endangered species with how policymakers and natural resource managers can or do respond to these challenges in practical terms.

The coeditors are professors Sara Shipley Hiles of the University of Missouri and David B. Sachsman of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

The book is available in hardcover and as an e-book.

It’s dedicated to environmental journalists around the world whose efforts continue to bring the extinction and biodiversity crisis to the attention of the public and policy makers and is published by Routledge as part of its Studies in Environmental Communication and Media series.

MSU undergraduates Logan Bry and Alexandra Swanson assisted with proofreading the manuscript. Former MSU master’s student Alexander Killion, now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, is the lead author of a chapter on the reintroduction of wolves to Isle Royale National Park.

Extinction isn’t new. However, the pace of extinction is accelerating globally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies more than 26,000 species as threatened. The causes are many, including climate change, overdevelopment, human exploitation, disease, overhunting, habitat destruction, and predators. The willingness and the ability of ordinary people, governments, scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses to slow this deeply disturbing acceleration are uncertain. Meanwhile, researchers around the world are laboring to better understand and communicate the possibility and implications of extinctions and to discover effective tools and public policies to combat the threats to species survival. This book presents a history of news coverage of endangered species around the world, examining how and why journalists and other communicators wrote what they did, how attitudes have changed, and why they have changed. It draws on the latest research by chapter authors who are a mix of social scientists, communication experts, and natural scientists. Each chapter includes a mass media and/or cultural aspect.

This book will be essential reading for students, natural resource managers, government officials, environmental activists, and academics interested in conservation and biodiversity, environmental communication and journalism, and public policy.

Knight Center director’s JFK book released as audiobook

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Audible has just released an audio version of John F. Kennedy in His Own Words edited by Knight Center director Eric Freedman and Edward Hoffman, an adjunct associate professor at Yeshiva University. Actor Stephen Molloy of Pennsylvania is the narrator.

One section deals with Kennedy’s views on environmental issues. As the introduction to that section notes, JFK had a recreational interest in the outdoors, favored protection of public lands from overuse and warned about urban and suburban sprawl. The ocean exerted a near-mystical hold on him, perhaps because of his family home on Cape Cod, his love of boating and his South Pacific naval exploits during World War II.

Like many members of his generation, Kennedy was allured by the power of science and the promise of exploration, believing those twin engines of the human mind and spirit could solve societal problems without environmental damage. Overall, however, his legislative initiatives reflected a policy that environmental interests shouldn’t trump agricultural needs and economic development, and that natural resources such as energy and water should be exploitable.

We see those sometimes complementing, sometimes conflicting, views in a speech he made in Hanford, Washington, in September 1963:

There are two points on conservation that have come home to me in the last two days. One is the necessity for us to protect what we already have, what nature gave to us, and use it well, not to waste water or land, to set aside land and water, recreation, wilderness and all the rest now so that it will be available to those who come in the future. That is the traditional concept of conservation, and it still has a major part in the life of the United States.

But the other part of conservation is the newer part, and that is to use science and technology to achieve significant breakthroughs as we are doing today, and in that way to conserve the resources which ten or twenty or thirty years ago may have been totally unknown. So we use nuclear power for peaceful purposes and power. We use new techniques to develop new kinds of coal and oil from shale, and all the rest. We use new techniques … in oceanography, so from the bottom of the ocean and the ocean we get all the resources which are there, and which are going to be mined and harvested. And from the sun we are going to find more and more uses for that energy whose power we are so conscious of today.

Other sections of John F. Kennedy in His Own Words present his thoughts on the economy, the arts, international affairs, politics, immigration, human rights, labor and other issues.

The audiobook is available for $19.95 from Audible. The book, originally published in 2005 by Kensington Publishing, is also available on Kindle and in paperback from Amazon.