Journalists
The Knight Center offers national and international training workshops to professional journalists interested in environmental reporting.
Local Training
MSU School of Journalism and the MSU Knight Center for Environmental Journalism hosted a Computer Assisted Reporting and Campaign Finance one-day workshop in July 2006. Read more about it here.
The Knight Center worked with the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit Public Schools and the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association to organize a training workshop for high school journalists held in February 2006. This event, which was held at the Detroit Science Museum, brought together 200 journalism students from the Detroit area for a workshop on environmental journalism. The workshop, with new topics, was offered again in February, 2007.
Also in the planning stages are weekend workshops on computer-assisted reporting, land use and ethics.
National training
Alaska: Reporting on the Climate Frontier.
Win a 2008 fellowship from Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and get up close with the biggest environmental story on the planet.
A dozen fellowship winners will be flown to Alaska this August 13 to August 16 to experience and directly learn about the impacts of global climate change. They’ll check out landscapes as diverse as diseased forests and ocean bays fed by the largest ice field in the United States.
From Oct. 22 to Oct. 25, 2006, in Burlington, Vt.,the Knight Center hosted the first Environmental Journalism Boot Camp. Participants had the opportunity to sharpen their environmental reporting skills in sessions that targeted reporters new to the beat but that were also valuable to veteran journalists. The sessions dovetailed with the Society of Environmental Journalists national conference Oct. 25 to Oct. 29 in the same city. Read more about it here.
Read about the 2008 Boot Camp here.
Each spring, the Knight Center hosts the Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute on the Michigan State University campus.
International training
The Knight Center is involved with many international training events.
In September 2005, Jim Detjen taught German journalists about environmental journalism at a workshop sponsored by the Bertelsmann Foundation in Cambridge, Mass. In November 2005, both Jim Detjen and Dave Poulson led a workshop on environmental journalism for Indian journalists at a conference of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists in New Delhi, India.
The Knight Center also is planning training events in Mexico, China and other parts of Asia and Latin America.
In January 2004, the Knight Center helped organize the first national environmental journalism conference for Mexican journalists in Mexico City, which was attended by 40 participants. The three-day workshop focused on air pollution, one of Mexico City's worst environmental problems.
The keynote speaker was Mario Molina, one of Mexico's most prestigious scientists and a 1995 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
As a result of the conference, Mexican journalists have launched a national association of environmental journalists. Based on the success of the Mexico City conference, the Knight Center is planning future international conferences in China and Latin America.
Contact the Knight Center for more information about the upcoming conferences and workshops.
