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Rising interest in e-journalism reflected in academic options
Sidebar: Continuing education opportunities
Rising interest in e-journalism reflected in academic options
BY SHARON FRIEDMAN
Iacocca Professor and Director of the Science & Environmental Writing Program
Lehigh University
Interest in environmental journalism and communication education has been growing steadily at universities for the past several years, despite fluctuations in interest in environmental coverage among editors at mainstream news organizations. New courses and programs are being developed, and most older ones continue to thrive despite academic downsizing.
This is not to imply that the growth has occurred overnight or that the field has exploded. Rather, the growth has been moderate, but steady. Currently, there are more than 30 courses in environmental journalism or communication being taught in the U.S. at both the undergraduate and graduate level. This is a significant increase over the six undergraduate environmental journalism courses and one graduate program listed in the 1978 edition of the Directory of Science Communication Courses and Programs.
While some university departments offer a lone course in environmental journalism, others offer complete degree-granting or certificate programs at the graduate or undergraduate level. Many programs combine environmental journalism and science communication, and have both journalism and science students enrolled. A number also are interdisciplinary, requiring training beyond journalism in science or science policy.
For example, the University of Missouri-Columbia is offering a new M.A. program in environmental reporting within its schools of journalism and natural resources. This program requires a sequence of courses in basic journalism, science writing, investigative reporting, and environmental writing -- as well as natural resources science. The goal is to provide students with a background in both the science that underlies environmental issues and in news media studies, writing, and reporting. The combined program gives students the option to do an M.A. thesis or a professional project. All students also receive commercial daily newspaper or television experience.
Michigan State University, home of the endowed Knight Chair in Environmental Journalism, is developing environmental journalism programs for undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students. Currently, MSU offers courses in environmental reporting, science and medical writing, and computer-assisted reporting, as well as seminars on specialized environmental and scientific topics. In the future, MSU will offer a specialized masters program in environmental studies and environmental journalism, in conjunction with several other departments.
In Fall 1996, Texas A&M University will begin a new M.S. program in Science and Technology Journalism. This program will blend journalism with science courses, including one in "Risk and Crisis Reporting." Barbara Gastel, the program's adviser, said "By helping students develop journalistic skills, scientific knowledge, and understanding of social issues, we hope to prepare them well for careers in fields such as environmental reporting."
Antioch New England Graduate School has developed a curriculum in environmental communications, which resides in the Environmental Studies Department. It prepares students along two tracks: one for writers, and one for organizational communicators.
In addition to these newer programs, there are older, established efforts at the graduate level. In 1992, the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder began an interdisciplinary graduate program. This program allows students to obtain an M.S. in journalism with an emphasis in environmental journalism, and also an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in environmental policy. In the journalism segment, students can pursue either mass communication research or news gathering, and they must complete 18 hours in environmental policy and science. This program collaborates closely with the university's Global Change and Environment Policy program, which was instrumental in establishing a new environmental journalism faculty position starting in Fall 1996.
New York University offers an even older graduate program that has recently experienced increased interest in environmental reporting. NYU has offered a three-semester program in science and environmental reporting for a number of years, primarily to undergraduate science students. Graduates receive an M.A. in journalism and a certificate in science and environmental writing.
At the undergraduate level, Lehigh University has offered a B.A. degree in Science and Environmental Writing since 1978. This program also is interdisciplinary, requiring a minimum of four courses in science or engineering plus a core set of journalism courses and four courses in science and environmental journalism. Students in the program cover scientific meetings on site, and write and edit a weekly Science and Environmental section for Lehigh's student newspaper. (Contact: Sharon Friedman, ph. 610-758-4179.)
Cornell University offers opportunities for undergraduates and graduates in environmental communication through several courses. Jim Shanahan, who teaches Environmental Communication and Mass Media, said "The Department of Communication at Cornell looks at environmental issues from a variety of perspectives. Our approach emphasizes a theoretical grounding in communication theory, applied to practical problem solving for environmental and scientific issues." A future environmental concentration will include courses in the communication process, applications, science and environmental communication, and introductory and advanced environmental science and policy.
Despite the advent of new programs, two older ones appear to be out of business, at least temporarily. An extensive undergraduate environmental journalism program at Western Washington University is in limbo because the program's director retired. The communication department at the University of Michigan (and its environmental writing efforts) were discontinued by university restructuring. The Scripps Environmental Fellows program, which was housed there, currently is on hold while trustees investigate a new site for the program.
Some universities, while not offering complete programs, have taught environmental journalism courses for some time. One of these is Marquette University, which has offered a course to graduate students for more than 15 years. The Environmental Communications graduate seminar at Brigham Young University is newer, having been taught since the early 1990s to both journalism and science/engineering majors in almost equal numbers. The University of Montana has been teaching one graduate environmental journalism course per year for the past four or five years, and hopes to develop a sequence of several courses in the future. A new course is being planned in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Other universities that have recently offered courses in environmental journalism or communication include: University of California-Berkeley, Central Michigan, Colorado State University, Columbia University, Indiana, Middle Tennessee State, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Northern Arizona, Ohio State University, University of Oregon, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Increased student interest
Many of the new efforts in environmental journalism education count on increased student interest to ensure their success. In a survey of environmental journalism faculty that I conducted in late 1993, 24 out of 25 faculty agreed that students were either much more or somewhat more interested in environmental journalism at that time than they had been five years earlier. The majority of these educators believed that this increased interest was driven by students' growing awareness of (and education about) environmental issues, as well as increased media coverage of the environment. (The educators who received this questionnaire were those on the JournE mailing list, academic faculty members of SEJ, or those listed as teaching environmental journalism courses in the 1991 Directory of Science Communication Courses and Programs in the U.S. Although 25 responses may appear few in number, this was more of a census than a sample, including responses from faculty teaching most of the environmental journalism courses in the nation.)
Journalism students weren't the only students showing increased interest in this field. Science students also were taking environmental journalism courses in larger numbers, particularly those majoring in environmental sciences or environmental studies. Others enrolling included students majoring in the social sciences, natural resource programs, and health sciences.
Increased student interest affected environmental journalism courses in several ways. About half the educators said their courses had larger enrollments than ever before, and one fourth said they were offering more courses in environmental journalism. In all, 19 people indicated that over the past five years they (or colleagues) had added courses or segments to courses about environmental journalism. Several even received support for developing new programs in environmental communication.
Fourteen educators said they offered one or more courses in which environmental journalism was the main topic, for a total of 26 courses as of 1993. (More have been added since then.) Of these courses, 13 were for undergraduates, six for graduate students, six included both, and one was unspecified. These courses were usually between three and five credits, and the predominant majors of students enrolled were either journalism or communication, or some form of environmental sciences or studies.
Sixteen educators said that they or departmental colleagues offered a total of 41 courses where environmental journalism was included, but not the main topic. Of these, 21 courses were in journalism or communication, 12 in science writing, three in environmental studies, and five in English. The majority were three-credit courses for undergraduates majoring in journalism/communication or science.
Problems faced by educators
Growth in courses and programs does not mean that environmental journalism education is without problems. From a teaching perspective, the faculty answering the survey had two overriding concerns: lack of effective textbooks, and differing skills among the wide variety of students in environmental journalism courses. Most educators felt that current texts were either too narrow or too general. They said they had to use a variety of books to cover the major segments of their courses. Some people noted, however, that there were other resources available for the classroom -- including reporting guides on various environmental issues and videotapes (see sidebar below).
The mixed backgrounds of students taking environmental journalism courses was considered both good and bad. While students from different fields brought various viewpoints to courses that enriched discussions, they also brought varying abilities. Journalism students generally had poor science backgrounds, while science students lacked media training. Said one educator, "Teaching a course in environmental reporting is tough because you have to bring students up to speed in a number of areas without boring those who already have a skill or know a field. This makes it harder to cover the wide range of subjects you need to include." To cope with this problem, some educators suggested requiring science minors for environmental journalism students.
Other student-based concerns among the educators included students' lack of statistical background and critical questioning skills. The educators called for more internships and more sophistication in teaching students about complicated environmental risks. A few people indicated that there was just too much to teach in one course -- they needed more time to deal with the science, technology, and law involved in environmental issues.
In the two years since the survey, educators who have developed new programs appear to have dealt with these problems in at least two ways. First, they offer several courses so that the many aspects involved in environmental journalism do not have to be jammed into one course. Second, they are requiring both science and science policy courses for their students.
Most administrative problems affecting environmental journalism courses cited in the survey centered around limited departmental budgets, restricted university funding, and a shortage of faculty members. Such hurdles did not allow these courses to be offered as frequently as they should have been. Several faculty noted that the number of students enrolling in environmental journalism classes had to be high if they were to be taught at all. Downsizing efforts at many universities cause pressure to teach larger, general journalism classes rather than smaller, specialized environmental writing courses.
Despite these problems (which have not gone away and perhaps have gotten worse at some universities recently), new programs have been developing, indicating the strength of the interest in environmental journalism education and its growing importance. Most of the surveyed educators felt that the field was indeed increasing in importance, and they credited it to the importance of environmental concerns as an issue for the nation and the world, and people's need to know more about these concerns.
Queried to provide advice for educators, 15 SEJ active members suggested that an ideal education for future environmental journalists would be an undergraduate program with a combination of journalism and science courses and some background in economics and politics.
They suggested that students need to know more about the complexities of risk and risk assessment, ecological relationships, and environmental law. They specifically pointed out the need for training in investigative techniques, computer-aided reporting, and database use. The journalists also urged educators to teach students to be skeptical and objective, and to establish a high standard for truth.
While such requests might be a tall order for all environmental journalism educators, many of these elements are already in place at various universities. More can be expected as environmental journalism education continues to mature.
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Sidebar: Continuing education opportunities
Workshops, seminars and year-long fellowships offer varied mid-career educational avenues for environmental reporters in the U.S. and abroad.
Short-term continuing education to help environmental journalists report on complex issues consists mainly of workshops or seminars that usually last from one to three days. Major U.S. efforts (besides SEJ's national and regional conferences) have been led by the Environmental Journalism Program of the Foundation for American Communications (FACS) and by the Environmental Journalism Center, which is sponsored by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF).
Originally funded by a $1 million, three-year grant, FACS has offered workshops including "The Future of the Endangered Species Act," "Oceans and the Environment," "Reporting on Water Resources," and "Global Environmental Issues."
The Environmental Journalism Center has presented several seminars beamed by satellite to broadcasters around the country. These are available as hour-long videos and include "Beyond the Spotted Owl: How to Cover the Environment in the 90s," "Risk Reporting: How to Cover Today's Top Environmental Health Stories," and "Covering Environmental Risk Stories." The Center's goal "is to put the tools needed to understand environmental issues in the hands of as many radio and television news people as possible."
A number of universities also have sponsored professional workshops. The Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland held a two-week seminar on "The Environmental Story" in 1992.
Taking a slightly different tack, Lehigh University, with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, developed presentations in 1992-93 for three different journalism society meetings to help reporters better understand the risk assessment process. The Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado has sponsored an annual three-day professional workshop since 1993 called "Charting the Environmental Journalism Frontier," with funding from the James M. Cox Foundation.
In 1995, the University of Montana offered a two-week summer program on forestry issues for 16 journalists, primarily sponsored by the American Forestry Foundation. It plans to offer similar programs regularly and will run a eight-day institute on forestry and mining issues in July 1996. Michigan State University will offer a Great Lakes Environmental Training Institute June 5-8, 1996, for journalists from the eight Great Lakes states and Canada, and also plans to hold similar events in the future.
For longer periods of training, there are the Nieman Fellowships for Environmental Journalists at Harvard University and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both fellowships offer an academic year's worth of scholarly roaming through classrooms to increase reporters' knowledge about a variety of issues. (See SEJournal, Summer 1995, for descriptions by SEJ members who held these fellowships.) Several SEJ members also have been Michigan Journalism Fellows, pursuing educational opportunities for an academic year on the campus of the University of Michigan. Although there is no specific environmental journalism slot yet in this program, efforts are being made to develop one.
On the international scene, there also has been extensive educational activity. The International Center for Journalists (formerly the Center for Foreign Journalists) has sponsored training programs in environmental journalism in various countries and in the United States, including a three-week effort for Asian journalists that was held in Washington, at Lehigh University, and the University of Colorado. It also co-sponsored environmental journalism workshops by two U.S. educators for reporters in Thailand, Nepal, and Bangladesh in 1994.
The Environmental Health Center has trained environmental journalists from Central and Eastern Europe for four years in the U.S. and abroad, with funding from the German Marshall Fund. This year, it brought four journalists from Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to the U.S. for three weeks. Besides sponsoring a clearinghouse activity for Central European journalists, the center has established a joint training program for journalism students at Moscow State University.
The Freedom Forum sent two U.S. environmental journalism educators to Southeast Asia in 1995 to give workshops on environmental reporting issues and techniques to reporters from Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. In 1994, it brought a team of environmental journalists and educators to Indonesia for an environmental journalism workshop.
A number of handbooks and videotapes to help reporters from the U.S. and abroad cover environmental topics also are available. In the U.S., publications from the Environmental Health Center include Reporting on Municipal Solid Waste: A Local Issue, Covering the Coasts: A Reporter's Guide to Coastal and Marine Resources, and Chemicals, the Press, and the Public. The Media Institute has published the second edition of Environmental Issues for the '90s: A Handbook for Journalists, Health Risks and the Press, and Reporting on Risk. Island Press has published Media and the Environment. Rutgers University Press has updated the Reporter's Environmental Handbook. RTNDF has prepared materials on endocrine disrupters, population, and alternative-fuel vehicles.
In Asia, the Asian-Pacific Forum of Environmental Journalists has just finished a second edition of Reporting on the Environment: A Handbook for Journalists. The first edition was translated into eight Asian languages and widely distributed. The Nepal Forum of Environmental Journalists recently prepared Playing with Poison, a handbook for reporters on pesticide use in that part of the world.
Even with all of these efforts, a number of environmental journalists and educators interviewed felt a need for more programs. They said that seminars and workshops help reporters better understand the science behind complex environmental issues, provide greater context for in-depth reporting, and allow them to write more thoughtful and thought-provoking articles. Continuing education is a way for all reporters to keep up to date and well informed.
From SEJournal Spring 1996
Note: for current program information, please visit our Education/Programs page.