MIAMI — The Michigan State University School of Journalism has been awarded $2.2 million by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to expand the educational, training and research efforts of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism over the next five years.

The grant, the largest in the 90-year history of the Journalism School at Michigan State University, will enable the center to significantly expand its programs. Since MSU has also pledged to contribute the equivalent of another $2 million to support the Knight Center’s programs, the actual value of this grant is more than $4 million.

“Our center will be able to dramatically increase its outreach and training efforts to journalists around the world,” said Jim Detjen, director of the Knight Center.

The funds will make it possible to set up a national “boot camp” for environmental journalists, expand international activities, develop online courses for reporters around the globe and create a specialization in environmental journalism in the MSU  master’s degree program.

MSU officials have pledged to make permanent the position of assistant director of the Knight Center, held by Dave Poulson, an award-winning environmental journalist for Booth Newspapers hired in January 2003. They have also committed to hiring an adjunct instructor to teach a course in environmental journalism for broadcasting students, to provide for additional technology, and to make available space for the expanded Knight Center programs.

Knight Foundation has now given nearly $4 million to support MSU’s environmental journalism program. Funding began with a $1 million award in 1992 to establish a Knight Chair in Journalism with a specific focus on environmental journalism. After a nationwide search the MSU School of Journalism hired Detjen, an award-winning reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the founding president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. In January 1995 Detjen began teaching at MSU.

Since 1990, the foundation has established 18 Knight Chairs in Journalism at major U.S. colleges and universities, investing $27 million in the program. Knight Chairs are classroom innovators, catalysts for new university programs and accomplished journalists who hope to improve their profession nationally.

“The story of our environment may well be the most important story of the coming century,” said Eric Newton, director of Journalism Initiatives at Knight Foundation. “Jim Detjen and the Knight Center will help thousands of journalists at home and abroad better tell that story.”

 The Knight grant consists of $2 million for expanded programs and a $200,000 “challenge grant” to help the Knight Center build an endowment for its activities. To qualify for the additional endowment money, the Knight Center will have to raise $600,000 in contributions by 2011.

The new Knight grant will be used to:

• Create an environmental specialization in the Journalism School’s master’s degree program. This specialization will include courses in environmental science and policy, a required internship and a strong ethics component.
• Set up an institute offering week-long training for environmental journalists. This “boot camp” will be modeled on the successful Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institutes the Knight Center has organized since 1996, but will be national in scope.
• Organize international workshops for training journalists about environmental reporting. The Knight Center will partner with other institutions to set up these institutes, which will likely be held in China and Latin America. These international workshops will be patterned after the successful conference for Mexican environmental journalists the Knight Center hosted in Mexico City in January 2004.
• Organize at least three environmental journalism summits and leadership retreats. These summits will identify and tackle some key problems facing the field of environmental journalism, such as the decline of environmental reporting on television and the shortage of journalists of color in the field.
• Organize weekend workshops for environmental journalists on subjects such as computer-assisted reporting, ethical issues faced by environmental journalists and land use.
• Develop online course modules on air and water pollution, land use issues, evaluating environmental risks and other topics. These courses and materials will then be available as training tools for journalists across the nation and the world.
• Write and publish a textbook on environmental journalism for use by journalism students and professional journalists.
• Increase the circulation and improve the quality of EJ magazine, the Knight Center’s award-winning magazine.
• Expand the Knight Center web site to include calculators and conversion tables, links to key web sites, seminal readings and other resources of value to environmental journalists.
• Conduct practical research on topics, such as the state of environmental reporting in the United States and historical research on pioneering environmental journalists. The funds will also be used to assess the success of the Knight Center’s programs in educating and training environmental journalists.

During the 10 years that Detjen has held the Knight Chair at MSU, the environmental journalism program has been involved in many activities. The program hosted the national conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2000, an event that attracted 515 participants from about 20 countries to MSU.

The program has also organized seven Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institutes for Canadian and American journalists and is now planning its eighth, which will be held June 7-11 at the Kellogg Center on the MSU campus and in Ontario, Canada.

Detjen and Poulson have created and taught more than a dozen courses in environmental and science journalism and have attracted students from around the world to study at MSU.

The MSU School of Journalism is one of the oldest, largest and most highly regarded journalism programs in the nation. The first journalism course was taught at MSU in 1910 and since 1949 the journalism school has been continuously reaccredited. Its undergraduate program was ranked ninth best in the U.S. in the 1998 edition of the Gourman Report, a respected rater of the nation’s educational programs.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities. Since it was established in 1950, Knight Foundation has approved more than $250 million in journalism grants. Learn more online at www.knightfdn.org/journalism.