Category Archives: Masters


 
Any MSU School of Journalism masters student can enroll in an environmental journalism class to fulfill graduate requirements or electives.
Students can also complete a specialized master’s degree environmental option that combines environmental journalism, science or policy courses. Students learn advanced reporting techniques for covering complicated environmental issues. The environmental option appears on a graduate’s transcript.
FAQ for masters program.
Students must be admitted into the M.A. Program in Journalism and have selected the Environmental Option. The MSU environmental journalism option requirements are here.

Knight Center and affiliated faculty teach a rotating schedule of graduate-level environmental journalism courses. Consult schedule of courses for the latest offerings.
Graduate students are encouraged to join the student Environmental Journalism Association and report for Great Lakes Echo, the Knight Center’s award-winning non-profit environmental news service.
They are encouraged to augment their study with environment classes and programs elsewhere at MSU such as through the Environmental Science and Policy Program.
    
 Apply
 
Applications to the School of Journalism’s masters program are accepted on a rolling basis. Students should submit an electronic application and send GRE scores and two copies of their official undergraduate transcript. International students should submit TOEFL scores. Send to:
 
MSU Admissions Office
250 Administration Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Mich. 48824
 
 
Applicants should also send the following:

three letters of recommendation
a 750-word autobiography
a 1,000-word statement of purpose
a resume
and an indication of interest in an assistantship or other financial aid
to the Journalism School:
 
MSU School of Journalism
c/o the Graduate Secretary
School of Journalism
305 Communication Arts Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1212
 
For questions, contact graduate student coordinator Nancy Ashley, ashleyn@msu.edu
  
Aid
 
Limited graduate assistantships are occasionally available, depending on faculty research grants. Students may also qualify for scholarships.
 

 
 

Learning how with Great Lakes Now

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By Donté Smith

Donté Smith

After spending most of my time in the Michigan State University journalism master’s program honing my photography skills, in the last year I focused on developing my writing and storytelling.

Joining the Great Lakes Now team allowed me to apply these skills in a new way while learning new techniques, like creating social media content, to stay prepared for the ever-changing world of journalism.

Experiences with Capital News Service and Great Lakes Echo gave me the confidence to pitch new story ideas and suggest fresh concepts for existing pitches.

My photography experience was appreciated, and I benefited from being around other photo- and video-focused people. They gave me new ideas for capturing images and suggested gear that would help me get the right shots for a story. While serving as both the reporter and the photographer for assignments was challenging, it helped me grow in both areas.

Joining the Great Lakes Now team was intimidating at first.

Being under the Detroit Public Television (PBS) umbrella, the organization was facing challenges related to federal funding reductions. I commend the Great Lakes Now team for providing me with engaging experiences while dealing with these challenges.

This experience taught me how much the world of journalism is constantly changing and that organizations like PBS will need to lean on their community-based models to face these challenges. Continue reading →

Knight Center graduate student delves into the reasons for the decline of butterflies

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PoweshiekSkipper.jpg: The Poweshiek skipperling, a rare prairie butterfly, is one of many butterfly species facing drastic declines in the U.S. Credit: Ruth Thornton.

Knight Center graduate student Ruth Thornton recently completed her master’s professional project titled “Butterflies in decline and saving the Poweshiek skipperling from extinction,” publicly available online on her website.

In the first of a series of three feature articles, Thornton explores recent scientific studies describing a decline in overall butterfly abundance of nearly a quarter between 2000 and 2020 and investigating the causes of the drastic decline, including pesticide use, habitat loss and climate change.

She also talks to experts researching non-chemical control of a prominent insect pest of soybeans to try to reduce the amount of pesticides applied to agricultural fields, a key suspect in the decline of butterflies in the Midwest. Continue reading →

Wildfires are changing and the way we report on them should change too, says experts

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By Clara Lincolnhol

Clara Lincolnhol

This is the 5h in a series of feature stories on environmental topics by Knight Center students who attended the 2025 Society of Environmental Journalists conference.

Urban wildfires differ from those that burn through remote forests, and forest management won’t stop them from happening, fire ecologists at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference said.

Fire historian and author Stephen Pyne says we’re dealing with a fire crisis. There’s too much bad fire, too much combustion and not enough good fire, he says.

“We have broken the serial ice ages of the Pleistocene and transformed a minor interglacial into a fire epoch — what I call the Pyrocene,” Pyne said.

The major culprit for increased “bad fires” is human fossil fuel combustion which contributes to climate change and makes wildfires more intense, he said.

Thinning forests is a way to prevent out-of-control fires, but those treatments are rarely done near communities and structures, rendering them unhelpful to deal with the problem of urban wildfires, said Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forestry organization.

These methods are called “fuel treatments” because they attempt to eliminate natural overgrowth and an abundance of kindling materials that fires use to grow and spread.

Thinning and logging can also create problems and contribute to the problem of “bad fires” since deforestation releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

Brian Kittler, the chief program officer of American Forests, says building fire-resilient communities requires preparing the communities and not just the forests nearby.

Updating zoning laws, infrastructure, using ignition-resistant materials while building and having defensible space around one’s property are more effective than “fuel treatments,” he said. Continue reading →

Knight Center alum investigates toxic plume in Ann Arbor

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Elinor Epperson

What began as a professional project at Michigan State has turned into a feature project at Michigan Public radio.

Elinor Epperson spent 18 months researching, writing, fact-checking and editing a series of threelongform articles about the Gelman plume, an area of groundwater contamination under Ann Arbor that is several decades old.

The contamination comes from the disposal of industrial wastewater disposal by Gelman Sciences, a one-time medical filter manufacturer.

She also wrote a reporter’s notebook and appeared on the Stateside podcast to provide a more condensed version of the project.

Epperson earned her master’s degree in journalism from the MSU School of Journalism in fall 2024 and still works at the station as an intern.