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 director speaks on corruption

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Eric Freedman interview on student TV station at East Kazakhstan State University

Knight Center director Eric Freedman spoke recently at an anti-corruption forum held at East Kazakhstan State University. The forum coincided with his two-week stint as a guest lecturer to journalism and language students at the university in Oskemen, Kazakhstan. 

 

Freedman and MSU Journalism School alum Jim Mitzelfeld won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of a corruption scandal in the Michigan Legislature as reporters in the Detroit News Lansing Bureau.

Here are Freedman’s remarks at the forum:

 

No society is free of corruption, and that is unfortunately true of the United States as well. Speaking as a journalist, a professor and a citizen, I worry about 3 major types of corruption in our society.

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Knight Center goes to the Society of Environmental Journalists conference

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Andrew Blok, Dave Poulson, Brian Bienkowski and Andy McGlashen

Knight Center director Eric Freedman and senior associate director Dave Poulson represented MSU at the recent annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Fort Collins, Colorado. At the conference Poulson finished his second three-year term as the academic representative on the SEJ’s board of directors.

 

The MSU team included, in alphabetical order:

  • Alaska fisheries and environmental reporter Margie Bauman, a Journalism School alum who visits the Knight Center each fall to speak to our classes and network with our EJ students.
  • Environmental Health News senior editor Brian Bienkowski, a Knight Center master’s alum.
  • Detroit Public TV news director Natasha Blakely, a former Great Lakes Echo staff writer,
  • EJ master’s student Andrew Blok, a staff writer for Great Lakes Echo.
  • Audubon magazine associate editor Andy McGlashen, a Knight Center master’s alum.

Margie Bauman and Natasha Blakely

The SEJ conference, “Headwaters to the Plains: Where Rivers, and Politics, Change Directions,” took place October 9-13 at Colorado State University.

Knight Center director speaks in Germany

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Environmental journalists around the world face physical, legal, emotional and economic perils for doing their work. Meanwhile, more than 25 years after the USSR collapsed, the Soviet legacy of environmental degradation still plagues the 15 countries that emerged from its dismantled empire.

Eric Freedman with agroforestry workshop team members at the “me Convention” in Frankfurt

Those were the broad stories that Knight Center director Eric Freedman told during two presentations at the recent “me Convention” in Frankfurt, Germany. The convention featured a wide variety of international speakers on technology, education, futuristic visions, exploration, diversity, entrepreneurship, story-telling, science fiction and societal changes.

In “At Distant Ends of the Soviet Empire: Environmental Challenges Today,” Freedman focused on major ecological problems in three parts of the former Soviet Union – overfishing in the Baltic Sea, poaching and illegal logging in the Republic of Georgia and the near-death of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. The presentation drew on his teaching, professional trainings and research as a Fulbright Scholar in Uzbekistan, Lithuania and the Republic of Georgia. Continue reading →