Category Archives: Speakers

Covering the waterfront: Workshop gives tips for reporting on water systems

Water expert Joan Rose, left, and journalists and Lansing's Board of Water and LIght treatment plant. The mural depicts the power of water. Image: Eric Freedman

Water expert Joan Rose, right, and journalists at a Lansing water treatment plant. The mural depicts the power of water. Image: Eric Freedman

By Amanda Proscia
Control panels shaped like Oldsmobile sedan grills, car door handles for controls and hubcaps used as light fixtures set the scene for a recent Knight Center workshop on how to report about drinking water.
More than a dozen Michigan journalists and environmental communicators met recently at the Lansing Board of Water & Light’s John F. Dye Water Plant for the daylong workshop, “Beyond Flint: Reporting the Unreported Water Stories in Your Community.”
It’s an unusual water plant with a design inspired by that city’s automotive history. And the walls feature murals depicting the beneficial and destructive potential of water, and another showing human control of nature and the importance of water that was painted by Charles Pollock, brother of the more famous artist Jackson Pollock. Continue reading →

Environment reporter talks AP with Knight Center students

John Flesher speaks with students over a pizza lunch. Image: Barb Miller.

John Flesher, left, speaks with journalism students at the Knight Center about his career at the Associated Press. Image: Barb Miller.

By Marie Orttenburger
John Flesher has spent almost his entire news career working for the Associated Press.
That’s given him an up-close view of the wire service’s evolution in the past 35 years.
He evolved as well, growing into environmental coverage and providing the AP with Great Lakes news—a coverage area it had not previously explored.
Flesher recently visited Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism to talk with students about his career path.
He began at the AP doing editing and broadcast writing assignments and general reporting at the Raleigh, North Carolina bureau. He covered a range of subjects before settling into a government and politics beat.
Continue reading →

Dan Fagin talks Toms River, environmental reporting, cats

Dan Fagin discusses environmental journalism and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Toms River with MSU students in the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism

Dan Fagin discusses environmental journalism and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Toms River with MSU students during a pizza lunch in the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. Image: Anthony Cepak

By Marie Orttenburger
Dan Fagin describes epidemiology as “a very long word for a very simple thing.”
What it amounts to is connecting the dots, he said recently at a presentation about his Pulitzer prize-winning book at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. Though the concept may be “simple,” the process is no small feat.
Fagin is an environmental journalist and director of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. He visited MSU to discuss epidemiology and how he applied it in writing his best-selling book, “Toms River.” Continue reading →

Pulitzer prize winning author to speak at Knight Center

Dan Fagin

The Pulitzer-prize winning director of the Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program at New York University is visiting the Knight Center next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Dan Fagin, an environmental science journalist and author of the best-selling Toms River, will give a public lecture at 3 p.m. Tuesday in Room 145 of the College of Communication Arts & Sciences.
His topic is Connecting the Dots in Toms River and Beyond. Fagin, a former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, will sign books after the lecture.
His lecture is co-sponsored by Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism the university’s Environmental Science and Policy Program and the MSU School of Journalism.