Knight Center director Eric Freedman and University of St. Thomas journalism professor Mark Neuzil have just published their new book Biodiversity, Conservation and Environmental Management in the Great Lakes Basin.

The book provides a cross-section of key scientific, policy and public administration research that may help shape the Great Lakes Basin’s future as ecologically unique and economically vital.
The Great Lakes Basin holds more than 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water. Threats to habitats and biodiversity there have economic, political, national security and cultural implications and ramifications that cross the U.S.-Canadian border.
The new book offers multidisciplinary perspectives on an array of environmental, biodiversity and conservation issues through the work of U.S. and Canadian researchers, practitioners, policy-shapers and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including biology, fisheries and wildlife, forestry, chemistry, political science, economics, journalism, community sustainability and geography.
Knight Center research director Bruno Takahashi, Freedman and Knight Center doctoral students Ran Duan, Tony Van Witsen and Apoorva Joshi wrote one chapter on how the press framed coverage of the centennial of the death of the world’s last passenger pigeon. Continue reading →

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Should we teach non-journalists to do journalism?
Fostering in non-journalists reporting skills and values like accuracy, fairness, transparency and engagement advances the function of the profession, David Poulson, the senior associate director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, writes in the latest edition of SEJournal.
​It also is an important use of the expertise of journalism instructors.
Poulson describes in “EJ Academy: Teaching Journalism Skills…To All Comers,” and published by the journal of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the value of teaching researchers and scientists to write.

“Journalism is hard,” writes Poulson, who spent a month last summer teaching journalism to journalists and researchers in Malawi, Rwanda and Peru. “Teaching it is yet another kind of hard. If you can do both, you’ve got mad skills that are in demand.”​