Twenty-five journalists from the United States and Canada, along with two senior environmental policy advisers from Mongolia, are scheduled to attend the second annual Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment May 14-19 at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The institute, hosted by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication's Center for Environmental Journalism, is a week-long educational program for journalists who cover environmental issues.
Participants take part in an intensive week of study designed to give them a unique window into some of today's most important environmental topics: urban sprawl, climate change, ecology and land management, weather prediction and environmental toxins.
The institute was established last year with a $50,000 grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation, which recently awarded an additional two-year grant of $100,000 to the Center to continue hosting the program.
According to Judith G. Clabes, president and CEO of the Scripps Howard Foundation, the mission for the institute is to bring working journalists together with some of the world's foremost authorities on environmental issues as a means of raising the bar for environmental reporting.
The Scripps Howard Foundation is dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism and is a leader in journalism education, scholarships, internships,
literacy, minority recruitment and development, and First Amendment causes.
Since 1997, the foundation also has provided an annual grant to the center for the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. Each year, five Scripps fellows spend two semesters at CU studying environmental science, policy, law and journalism and working on individual research.
The Center for Environmental Journalism at CU -- the first of its kind in the United States -- dates to 1992. The center is part of CU's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which offers undergraduate majors a broad education in the liberal arts, while graduate students may choose specialty areas, including environmental journalism.