Knight Center director Eric Freedman has joined the board of directors of the newly formed  City Pulse Fund for Community Journalism, established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to support community and investigative reporting by the 18-year-old alternative weekly newspaper based in Lansing.

Freedman is the board’s vice president.

Berl Schwartz, the founder and publisher of City Pulse, said the new nonprofit will support the paper in its mission to continue and expand its local coverage, with an emphasis on investigative reporting.

Nonprofit status will allow gifts from individuals and foundations to be tax deductible, he added. “We hope the tax break will encourage our readers to be even more generous and help us win foundation support for special projects.”

Schwartz, the ex-general manager of the State News and a former adjunct faculty member at the MSU School of Journalism, is president of the board.

Bill Castanier is the board secretary. An alum of the MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, he’s a former journalist and state agency public information director who now writes frequently for City Pulse.

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 2020.
• Application deadline: March 15, 2020. Awards will be announced by March 20, 2020. Projects should begin in March 2020 and be completed with a final report by the end of December 2020.
• Read about the successful 2017-2018 grantees at https://knightcenter.jrn.msu.edu/2018/01/16/three-high-schools-win-journalism-environmental-science-grants-from-the-knight-center-2/

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 March 15, 2020 to Barb Miller at mille384@msu.edu

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

Professor Bahtiyar Kurambayev

Journalism faces a series of ethics crises, particularly in Central Asia because journalism there is marked by wide ethical misbehavior, including lack of balance and impartiality, using multiple fake names, selling and/or buying news and bribing journalists.

A new study by Professor Bahtiyar Kurambaev of KIMEP University in Kazakhstan and Knight Center director Eric Freedman analyzes professional ethical perspectives and practices of Central Asian professional journalists by examining and comparing attitudes in four former Soviet republics that gained their independence in 1991

Professor Eric Freedman

Their article, “Ethics and Journalism in Central Asia: A Comparative Study of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan,” in the Journal of Media Ethics uses in-depth interviews with 24 journalists to examine their ethical ideals in the profession and how their ethical perspectives impact potential democracy. Its significance lies in revealing the gravity of ethical misbehavior in a region many where journalists call ethics a “Western luxury” and where public life has been filled with falsehoods.