Sending in Support
Knight Center begins endowment fundraiser.
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| Jim Detjen is a professor and director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University. He is the founding president of the Society of Environmental Journalists and was the president of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists from 1994 to 2000. |
An envelope.
It’s part of an effort to sustain the mission of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism in the years to come.
We’ve been given a great opportunity. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation believes so strongly in what we are doing that it has offered us a challenge grant to help us build an endowment. For every three dollars we raise, the Knight Foundation will give us an additional dollar. The goal is to build a Knight Center endowment of $800,000 by 2010.
The interest earned from this endowment will be used to support scholarships for our students and the journalists who attend our workshops. It will be used to develop online training courses that will make it possible for journalists around the world to obtain training in environmental journalism. It will enable us to carry out outreach and research efforts that will improve the quality of environmental journalism in Michigan, the United States and around the world.
Ultimately, it will help provide us with the resources to help train students and journalists to report and write about global climate change, population issues, air and water pollution, the loss of plants and animals, the depletion off the world’s fisheries, the destruction of wetlands and forests and other vitally important environmental issues.
It will help us support EJ, the award-winning magazine you hold in your hands.
I encourage you to send in a contribution to the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism Endowment Fund. Please make checks payable to Knight Center Endowment. All donations are tax deductible and will be acknowledged with a thank you letter and receipt.
Please mail checks to:
Knight Center Endowment
382 Communication Arts Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824.
For more information, please contact me at detjen@msu.edu.
Thank you for your support!
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On March 17, 2006, the MSU Journalism School faculty voted to establish in principle a new master’s degree “option” in environmental journalism. This means that beginning in the fall of 2007 incoming students will be able to take a specialized track of courses on environmental journalism, environmental science and environmental policy.
As part of this effort, the J-School will begin offering in the fall a new course, “Advanced Environmental Reporting,” which will be aimed at incoming master’s degree students. It will be a graduate-level version of the environmental reporting class I have been teaching at MSU since 1995.
While some details of the new environmental journalism track are still being worked out, we expect it will include a broadcast course in environmental journalism, more courses in computer-assisted reporting, a required internship in environmental journalism, courses in environmental science and policy and a master’s degree project in environmental journalism.
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The cover story of this issue of EJ is on Project Documerica, an archive of more than 22,000 environmental images that exist in the National Archives. This archive was created more than 30 years ago, but until recently was largely forgotten. Jeremy Herliczek, a graduate of the master’s degree program at Michigan State University, stumbled upon this valuable resource and received funding from the Knight Center to develop ways to make these images more accessible to environmental journalists and the public. Jeremy conducted research on this archive as part of an independent study project he did for the Knight Center.
This is a prime example of the kinds of research that students and faculty associated with the Knight Center of Environmental Journalism carry out. I believe strongly in conducting research that directly benefits the public. This is part of the philosophy of land grant universities, such as MSU, which were set up to serve the needs of citizens.
Among our other research projects is the development of the Meeman Archives, a collection of tens of thousands of articles about the environment that were published in newspapers during the past 30 years. Since last September, our students have entered summaries of more than 3,500 articles into an electronic database.
Our goal is to make this collection of award-winning journalism available to journalists, scholars and private citizens.
I believe that both the Meeman Archives and Project Documerica are important resources that will prove invaluable to journalists and scholars who chronicle the development of environmental journalism over time. These efforts are examples of the kinds of practical research projects the Knight Center supports as part of our land-grant mission.
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