We’re looking for a certain breed of Great Lakes journalists. You can help.

Here’s why: Great Lakes Echo is but one of the initiatives Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism has underway to improve the quality of the region’s environmental reporting. We also support the reporting at other publications.

And while we have a handle on a lot of the reporters who are doing it, we certainly don’t know them all.  If you know of a journalist covering the environment in a Great Lakes state or province, we need your help identifying and contacting them. If you are one, tell us who you are and how to reach you.

That’s important as we look at how we can best support environmental reporting in this region.

We’re part of one of 15 regional coalitions supported by the National Science Foundation under its Climate Change Education Partnership program. As part of that effort, the Knight Center is helping assess the state of climate change journalism within the Great Lakes region.

This assessment during a period of intense change in how journalism happens will help us further develop programs for supporting it.

We’re casting a broad net to consult with a diverse group of journalists within the Great Lakes region.  Sure, full time environmental reporters are an increasingly rare breed. But relevant journalists may be reporting on climate change in the context of local, business, transportation, energy or other kinds of news. We need to talk to them and to others.

The kind of media – online, broadcast, print, photo, mobile – and the size of the news organization are unimportant.

Just send their name, publication, location and contact information to me at poulsondavid@gmail.com. Put “journalist” in the subject line. We will be inviting them to complete a survey.

And I’ll keep you posted as this project develops.

Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.