Category Archives: Writing

Environmental reporting at Bridge Michigan

By Isabella Figueroa Nogueira

Isabella Figueroa Nogueira

Isabella Figueroa Nogueira was an environmental reporting intern at Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit statewide news service, in collaboration with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

My summer internship as an environmental reporter at Bridge Michigan gave me a better understanding of what it means to work as a professional journalist. Going into the internship, I was excited to report on environmental issues across Michigan and gain experience in a newsroom outside of college journalism.

By the end of the summer, I felt that I had grown not only as a reporter, but also in my confidence, independence and understanding of what kind of journalist I want to become.

One of the best parts of the internship was getting to work on environmental stories that mattered to communities across Michigan. I was able to report on issues ranging from data centers and their environmental impacts to wildlife, water and other environmental policy issues. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to talk with people directly affected by the issues I was covering. Being able to interview sources, attend meetings and take information from documents and turn it into a story made the work feel meaningful.

I also appreciated how much independence I was given. I was trusted to pitch stories, reach out to sources, conduct interviews and work through reporting on my own. At first, that independence could be intimidating. In life, there are always deadlines and assignments.

However, working in a professional newsroom requires you to manage your own time and constantly prioritize tasks, even as the deadlines keep coming. I had to learn how to stay organized and hold myself accountable without always having someone checking in on me.

One of the biggest challenges I faced was motivation. Working largely on my own meant that there were days when it was difficult to get myself into a productive mindset, especially when a story was taking longer than expected or I was waiting for sources to respond.

Reporting can involve a lot of emails, phone calls, research and dead ends before there is anything to show for it. I learned that motivation does not always come before doing the work. Sometimes, I had to start making the calls, reading the documents or writing the first few paragraphs before I felt motivated. That was an important lesson for me because journalism requires consistency, even when a story is not moving as quickly as I want it to.

Another part of the experience was learning how to balance a full-time internship with the rest of my life. Working 40 hours a week gave me a better idea of what a career in journalism could actually look like. It was an adjustment to have so much of my week centered around reporting, especially when a story followed me home mentally even after I was done working for the day.

At the same time, I learned how important it is to give myself time to step away from the work. Having a routine outside of the newsroom helped me come back to my stories with a clearer mind and reminded me that being a good journalist does not mean thinking about journalism every second of the day.

Overall, my time at Bridge Michigan helped me become a more independent and confident reporter. I learned that journalism is not always exciting interviews and finished stories. A lot of it is persistence, organization, rejection and figuring things out on your own. While there were moments when I struggled with motivation or felt unsure of myself, those challenges made the experience more valuable. I am leaving the internship with a better understanding of both the kind of reporter I want to be and the work it will take to get there.

 

Attacks on individual U.S. journalists are escalating, Knight Center director says

In today’s overheated political environment, individual journalists find themselves targets of aggressive criticism, slurs, insults and threats of violence, verbal attacks that go beyond the traditional criticism of news organizations by people unhappy with what the report.

Knight Center director Eric Freedman examines this deeply troubling trend in a column for Capital News Service.

 

What does Rapunzel have to do with environmental journalism?

Photo credit: Johnny Gruelle, 1922

A new paper by Knight Center researchers reaches back to a famous Grimm Brothers fairy tale to explain the importance of training environmental journalists how to report on academic studies.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel: Let Down Your Golden Hair: Using Study-to-Story to Bring Environmental Research Out of the Ivory Tower” describes how students affiliated with the center’s Great Lakes Echo news service find, analyze, contextualize, translate and report on scholarly studies for general audiences.

Much like Rapunzel, many environmental researchers are imprisoned — or, more precisely, their work is imprisoned — in metaphorical ivory towers known as scholarly journals. Most of them are peer-reviewed publications that lack the glitzy public relations apparatus of such prominent and media-savvy mainstream journals as Science, Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Most environment-related studies that Great Lakes Echo reports about appear in smaller and niche journals that few, if any other reporting usually look at. That gives our stories the impact and prominence of exclusivity because we are usually the first news organization to cover them.

The paper by Knight Center director Eric Freedman, graduate research assistant Julia Belden and undergrad research assistants Victoria Witke and Isabella Figueroa Noguira was presented at the August conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communications in New Orleans.

Julia Belden presenting the Rapunzel paper.

The authors say that the Great Lakes Echo model can be adapted by other journalism programs to encourage student reporting that draws on environmental research.

 

Knight Center researchers share their work in Latin America at international conferences

Knight Center Research Director Bruno Takahashi and doctoral researchers Iasmim Amiden dos Santos and Julia Belden participated in a series of international speaking engagements, sharing their research on environmental communication in Latin America.

Many of these presentations build on their recent co-authored publications, including an article in Environmental Communication that examines the experiences of Latin American scholars working in the field and another that explores Indigenous communication and decolonial journalism in the Peruvian Amazon.

Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos co-organized and participated in the second symposium of the Red Latinoamericana de Estudios en Comunicación Ambiental/Latin American Network for Environmental Communication Studies (Red LECA), hosted by the Universidad de La Sabana in Chía, Colombia.

The symposium focused on the relationship between democracy and environmental communication and brought together scholars from across the region to discuss emerging research and collaborative initiatives. More information about the event can be found here.

Amiden dos Santos moderating a panel on environmental journalism at the second symposium of Red LECA.

Following the symposium, Takahashi visited the Universidad de Montevideo in Uruguay and the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina.

In Uruguay, he taught in the Diplomado en Comunicación, Ambiente y Sostenibilidad and presented his research on environmental journalism and science communication to faculty, students, and professional communicators. He was also interviewed by news outlets, including Canal 5 Noticias. In Buenos Aires, he delivered a lecture on the development of environmental communication research in Latin America.

Takahashi in Canal 5 Noticias, Montevideo, Uruguay

Takahashi presenting at the Universidad de Buenos Aires

Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos also traveled to Peru to conduct fieldwork for a project funded by the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA). The project examines communication practices among Indigenous organizations and environmental NGOs regarding Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) in the Peruvian Amazon.

Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos leading a focus group in Iquitos, Peru.

During this visit, they also presented their research at the Universidad Científica del Sur (UCSUR) and at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. More information about these engagements can be found here. Amiden dos Santos, now a visiting professor at UCSUR, also taught a class on strategic communication.

Amiden dos Santos presenting at the Universidad Cientifica del Sur, Lima, Peru

Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos with faculty and staff at the Universidad Cientifica del Sur, Lima, Peru.

In late June, the researchers presented at the pre-conference on climate change communication and at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), held in Dublin and Galway, Ireland, respectively. Their presentations highlighted the distinctive characteristics of environmental communication research in Latin America and emphasized the importance of expanding opportunities for scholars from the region to share their perspectives in international academic forums.

Amiden dos Santos presenting at IAMCR in Dublin.

Julia Belden presentng at ICA in Cape Town, South Africa

Incoming doctoral student Julia Belden presented at the conference of the International Communication Association conference in Cape Town, South Africa. The study, a collaboration with Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos, presents an analysis of the environmental communication academic literature from Latin America.

Later this summer, Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos presented research on decolonial environmental journalism in Bolivia and Indigenous decolonial communication in the Peruvian Amazon at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in New Orleans.

 

Takahashi and Amiden dos Santos presenting at AEJMC in New Orleans.

These international engagements reflect the Knight Center’s commitment to advancing environmental communication research and fostering collaborations with scholars, journalists, and practitioners around the Latin America. By sharing research and building partnerships across the region, the Center continues to contribute to more inclusive and globally connected conversations about environmental communication.