Category Archives: Workshops

The Knight Center for Environmental Journalism organizes workshops to help journalists better report on the environment in the U.S. and abroad. Information about recent and upcoming conferences is posted here.

Knight Center team attends science writers conference

Five environmental journalism students and Knight Center director Eric Freedman attended the recent annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers in Chicago.

They were undergrads Clara Lincolnhol, Emilio Perez Ibarguen and Isabella Figueroa Nogueira and master’s students Shealyn Paulis and Julia Belden.

Topics ranged from skill-building such as editor-freelance relations, using data in stories, making science videos and how reporters can conduct their own mini-investigations to issues such as the future of U.S. science, AI and data centers, nuclear weapons and the brain drain.

The students will be writing stories for the Knight Center website and Facebook page and the Journalism School’s Facebook page on lessons learned from the conference.

Also attending the conference from MSU were Knight Center master’s alum Ruth Thornton, university science public relations manager Emilie Lorditch, outreach specialist and MSU alum Ana Becerril of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams and Angela Prete, a graduate student in microbial & molecular genetics.

 

High school students visit Knight Center

Troy Athens High School students

Students from three Southeast Michigan high schools recently spent a day at the Knight Center, learning about environmental journalism and touring the School of Journalism, the Spartan Newsroom and the WKAR TV studios.

Kelly House, the environmental reporter at the nonprofit Bridge Michigan news service, spoke to the students and teachers at lunch.

Skyline High School and Huron High School in Ann Arbor and Troy Athens High School received Knight Center grants for their journalism and environmental science students and teachers to develop collaborative media projects.

Huron High School students

As part of the grant program, the Knight Center also arranged for former reporters Nancy Hanus and Ron Recinto to serve as professional mentors to the teams.

In “Why Native Plants,” the Troy Athens team explored the push and rationale to use native plantings at the school district’s new construction sites. Here’s the presentation and video about the project.

The Huron team looked at how students used wildlife tracking cameras to study biodiversity and Miller Creek, which runs into the Huron River. Its presentation is here.

Skyline High School students

“Skyline’s Salamanders & Wetlands” is an account of ongoing efforts to protect an endangered salamander on the high school’s grounds. The team’s presentation is here.

Remote sensing satellites are revealing global methane emissions

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Anna Barnes

By Anna Barnes

Methane gas is a cornerstone in the climate change conversation. Reducing emissions is a critical part of mitigation but there is one ever-standing issue of this elusive gas: it’s invisible.

At the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference 2025, one panel focused on locating and mapping methane pools to increase targeted action against the pollutant. The panel, “Revealing the Invisible: How Remote-Sensing Satellites are Transforming Methane Accountability and Climate Action,” included Deborah Gordon, the senior principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) Climate Intelligence Program.

Gordon said identifying methane has always been a struggle for scientists.

“It’s invisible, it’s odorless,” she said. “It wants to escape from any system it’s in. So here I was early on in my career, given a bucket of soapy water and a paintbrush, and I was going around to see where the pressure would form with a bubble that would come.” Continue reading →

Knight Center researchers present studies on environmental journalism in Latin America

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Knight Center director Eric Freedman and Knight Center doctoral student and research assistant Iasmim Amiden dos Santos presented two papers on environmental journalism in Latin America at the 2025 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference, held August 7-10 in San Francisco, California.

Eric Freedman presenting at AEJMC

Freedman presented a case study of three Knight Center training programs for professional journalists and students in Bolivia, Chile and Peru. The programs were designed to strengthen skills, expand networks and build knowledge of environmental science and policy, while adapting to each country’s social, political and environmental context.

Freedman also addressed the challenges of conducting training during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Peru program shifted to a virtual format. Despite those hurdles, Freedman stressed the benefits of these initiatives in improving accuracy, ethics and fairness in reporting – especially in contexts with limited funding for investigative work, restrictions on press freedom and physical or legal threats that undermine journalists’ ability to cover environmental degradation and related social conflicts. Continue reading →