PODCAST: MSU environmental journalism summit addresses problems

This year marked a century of journalism education at Michigan State University. And who doesn’t love a birthday party?

[Soundbite: Detjen greeting first panel]

Well, there wasn’t a cake. But the school hosted a conference to celebrate the fact that a century ago, the school, then called the Michigan Agricultural College, offered its first journalism course.

About 200 guests and speakers flooded the first floor of the Communication Arts Building to attend.

[Soundbite: registration area]

As part of the conference, the school’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism hosted its third environmental journalism summit. The last two summits in 2006 and 2008 focused on what were considered problem areas in the field.

Detjen: So, the theme of this one is on innovations and economic models because we’re really concerned about the current economic models that support quality environmental reporting.

Jim Detjen is the director of the Knight Center. He’s also this reporter’s academic adviser.

Detjen: As you know there have been a great number of newspapers that have either collapsed or laid off a lot of journalists, and so the field of journalism is undergoing a lot of change.

Panelists like Brant Houston, introduced new ideas like the non-profit model.

Houston: A lot of journalists that have been in newsrooms for awhile are learning to be entrepreneurial and it come as quite a shock to the system.

Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He explained that non-profits can earn income from a variety of resources like from memberships, training and workshops, and foundations.

Houston: Of late I’ve started telling them yes you’re a journalist, but on the other hand you’re running the equivalent of  a shoe store. You got to get up in the morning, figure out how many shoes you have, how many you need to order, how many you need to sell, how you’re going to make payroll and by that I’m just using shoes as the idea that you are in business, and maybe non-profit, but you are producing content, and somehow you’ve got to get paid for it.

Joaquin Sapien represented ProPublica a non-profit organization based out of New York City. Established in 2007, ProPublica won a Pulitzer Prize this year and receives millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation. This kind of support allows ProPublica to sustain longer and more in-depth story campaigns, that is not possible for most organizations.

Sapien: We were able to pursue a steady campaign of stories, I mean we did 65 stories over the course of a year and a half or so just on gas drilling alone which is something that is, you know, really unique, because I just don’t see the opportunity for reporters to pursue this kind of work at your, you know, conventional newspapers …and so this is one of the things that Paul Steiger had in mind when he started ProPublica, and it worked.

Anne O’Dell, a senior journalism student at Michigan State University attended the panel. She thinks this summit is a sign that journalism is trying to acclimatize to this new media climate.

O’Dell: I do think that it says a lot about how journalists are expanding to a new market that is pretty unpredictable right now and that they’re doing what they can to adapt and survive in this world.

But even with this attempt to adapt the idea of new journalists stepping into the field may not be a comfortable one. I asked O’Dell if she was frightened to graduate this December.

O’Dell: Yeah and see where I’m going to end up? Yeah, definitely.

For Great Lake Echo, I’m Alice Rossignol