Here at Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism we believe that a university should do more than teach good journalism.

While mainstream journalism jobs dwindle and the profession comes to grips with technological revolution, we believe we have an obligation to nurture environmental journalism while serving the public. Teaching is a vitally important university role. So are creation, innovation, research and service.

Part of what you’ll see on this site is our attempt to concentrate the environmental reporting efforts within the Great Lakes basin. The Great Links on the right rail are links to stories produced by other news organizations. Each day you’ll find those and even more behind the appropriate category or regional link on the navigation bar.

But we’re also producing original content. Like today’s feature about computer recycling, initially much of the original content will be reported by students at MSU and perhaps other universities. To be honest, it will be a challenge to feed this daily beast with the scant resources we have to devote to it. But we hope to do more. This effort is a proof-of-concept that we will demonstrate to those who support the spread of quality environmental news and information. No promises how that will turn out. But the greater the support, the better we will be able to fight for quality journalism regarding the environment within the Great Lakes region.

Our hope is to partner with commercial media in a way that allows greater use of the content that we produce. Environmental journalism is a public utility that needs to be supported by multiple sources and distributed in multiple venues.

So take a look around. You can subscribe to our RSS feed from the link at the top of the page. And you’ll notice that you can help out by submitting links to stories in the box toward the bottom right. If you have something to add to a story, you have plenty of opportunity to submit comments.

In fact that comment feature might be a good thing to use right now. Tell us what you think below.