Environmental journalism internships, jobs and scholarships for MSU journalism students.

The MSU Knight Center’s initiative to diversify reporters and reporting on environmental challenges offers significant scholarships, training and internships that benefit emerging and diverse student journalists in any field.

 One focus of the program is on building expertise with paid opportunities to cover environmental threats that particularly harm marginalized communities. We’re looking for students who contribute to diversity report on how environmental decisions threaten social justice, civil rights, the health and values of diverse communities.

The expertise of journalists is their lived experience. When it is diverse, better reporting happens and better decisions are made about environmental threats.

The program does not require environmental experience.

Right now the program is soliciting candidates for two programs: Continue reading

MSU hosts screening of new Knight Center supported environmental documentary about Nicaragua

Photo credit: Patrol project

The new documentary “Patrol” is about Indigenous Rama and Afro-descendent Kriol communities of Nicaragua fighting illegal cattle ranching in the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve not far from the Costa Rican border.

The film, supported in part by a grant from the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, will be aired on the MSU campus.

“This is the story of them and how they struggle to protect their ancestral territory,” said Tardi, an activist, who decided to stay anonymous for safety reasons. Continue reading

Knight Center student reports from Iceland on sustainable cruises

Cassidy Hough

Is there such a thing as a sustainable cruise vacation?

MSU Knight Center graduate Cassidy Hough recentl produced a video about environmentally responsible cruise ships as part of a reporting trip she won to Iceland.

The contest is sponsored by Planet Forward, an environmental media non-profit organization operated by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

Hough won first place in the “Best Use of Science or Data” category of the competition with a report on perennial grains when she hosted the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism’s Food Fix podcast.

Continue reading

Environmental lessons I learned in Australia

By Cameryn Cass

The first time I left America, I didn’t get very far: I went to Toronto for a mini-holiday. Though only four and a half hours from my hometown, it felt much farther than that. It was exciting and new and – dare I say – foreign. Unlike my 19-year-old peers, I was drawn to the city for something other than legal drinking: I went in search of adventure.

You see, I enjoy living outside my comfort zone. I figure the more I do, the larger that zone will become.

Former Great Lakes Echo writer Cameryn Cass on the scene in Australia

So for my final semester at Michigan State, I decided to pack my bags and live 9,370 miles (15,080 kilometers) from home in Sydney, Australia. Instead of studying abroad, I interned at a lovely nonprofit called the Ethics Centre in the heart of the city.

I had the opportunity to write and edit stories and meet philosophers and experience imposter syndrome daily. I got used to spelling color with a “u” and writing the date with the number first, followed by the month. Did you know writing the date with the number sandwiched between the month and year is almost exclusively American? I think we ought to reconsider how we write that. And also adopt the metric system.

But, back to Australia. My internship went from February to mid-April, but I stayed until July 24 (24 July). I saw Brisbane and sat beside kangaroos all afternoon at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo. I hiked at Cradle Mountain and easily fell in love with Hobart, Tasmania.

I visited New Zealand and its Hobbiton, having never seen the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings films and left a piece of my heart in Queenstown.

And I got lost in the equatorial heat and traffic lightless roads of Bali, visiting my cousin there for 15 days. Continue reading