The Colorado College Journalism Institute launched the Reporting on Wildfires class in Fall 2023 after a science professor won a 2021 National Science Foundation grant that included the Journalism Institute as a partner. Since then, 30 CC students have received state-of-the-art wildfire journalism instruction.
CC professor Dr. Rebecca Barnes and her colleagues and collaborators from Colorado State University and the University of California, Riverside, were awarded $844,435 for their project, “Role of Soil Microbiome Resilience in Ecosystem Recovery Following Severe Wildfire.” The team was investigating the role of the soil microbes in the forest recovery following severe wildfires. The Journalism Institute’s role in the grant was to help translate scientific research about wildfires to the public in an accessible way. Additionally, the Journalism Institute hoped they could help scientists become better communicators by giving them an outlet to report on their findings.
Award-winning journalist and manager of the Journalism Institute Corey Hutchins taught 11 students during that Block 1 class, where he had students read wildfire journalism and meet with journalists who cover wildfires, including photojournalist Helen Richardson, Jesse Paul of The Colorado Sun, and Stacy Feldman of Boulder Reporting Lab. The class participated in several field trips where they visited burn scars and met with wildfire scientists, Forest Service officials, people who fought the wildfires, those who covered the fires, and others who were impacted by the fires. Students finished the course by conducting field reporting and publishing their own wildfire journalism for the course’s newsletter, Burning Questions.
Students in the Reporting on Wildfires class helped translate scientific research to the public in Burning Questions, where they published several stories during the class, as well as reported on the research the grant’s collaborators were doing at CSU.
This past Block 7, Hutchins taught the class again. During his research for the class, he had gone through training to become a certified wildland firefighter to both learn more about fire behavior and so he could gain better understanding about the role of wildland firefighters, particularly in the West. To complete this training, Hutchins spent four days at the nonprofit Colorado Firecamp in Salida, CO and was inspired to give his students the same opportunity to go through this training.
“Some of the best reporters who cover wildfires have gone through training to become certified wildland firefighters,” Hutchins says. “In Colorado, having a so-called Red Card might get a reporter better access to a fireline, but just the knowledge you gain by going through the process is invaluable. Ask any firefighter if they’ve ever been on the fire and then read, watched, or heard news about it, and they’ll tell you journalists sometimes get the terminology wrong or sometimes don’t have a solid grasp on what’s happening. This kind of training gives you a real grounding about what’s what when it comes to wildfires.”
“Reporting on Wildfires was the most uniquely CC class I have taken, and I loved every minute of it,” says Sydney McGarr ’27, an English major and Journalism and Spanish minor. “I really enjoyed being able to explore journalism, which I love, at the intersection of wildfire training, which I knew nothing about. This class prepared me to confidently enter the journalism field in Colorado and surrounding states with a knowledge of how to safely, quickly, and proactively tackle wildfire stories, which are becoming increasingly common.”
McGarr plans to pursue print journalism after graduating and says she is confident that the skills she learned in this class will stick with her for a long time, both because they will be useful to her in future jobs, but also because the class was so memorable and fun that the lessons would be hard to forget.
“To me, this class exemplifies the CC experience: not just learning about something on a white board, but truly getting your hands dirty and learning through experience and activity,” McGarr says. “The class broadened my perspective on journalism, but also went beyond that to teach me about firefighting, fire science, and how the world of firefighting will shift with increased fire seasons due to climate change.”
Lorelei Smillie ’25, who is now writing for several publications in Colorado, says that it is useful to know so much about wildfire mitigation and prevention when she’s working on her stories.
“As a reporter, reporting on wildfires is a critical skill to develop with the changing times,” says Smillie, who majored in Political Science and minored in Journalism and French. “It’s been helpful to specialize in the topic to be able to explain scientific terms and emergency protocol language to the public in order to write quickly and efficiently. This kind of translation is necessary to ensure public safety and also in writing longer pieces about wildfire fighting, prevention, and history.”
Smillie says that it is so important for future CC students to get to go through the Colorado Firecamp training because it can increase access to the fires.
“Laws vary state by state in terms of how close journalists can get to the fire,” Smillie says. “This directly impacts information access and the ability to report on what’s happening. Becoming certified as a wildland firefighter through this course is essential to reporting on wildfires since it allows you to get as close as possible to the action while also having knowledge on how to protect yourself without endangering others.”
Students received both S-130 and S-190 certifications after completing the training.
The period for the 2021 NSF grant has ended, so CC, the Journalism Institute, and CSU are applying for another NSF grant. If awarded, Hutchins would teach the Reporting on Wildfires class again, with students going through the same Colorado Firecamp training. The Journalism Institute is also hoping that the grant could provide support for summer internships for students to report on wildfires and wildfire issues for publications including The Pikes Peak Bulletin and The Colorado Sun.
“To me, this class exemplifies the CC experience: not just learning about something on a white board, but truly getting your hands dirty and learning through experience and activity. The class broadened my perspective on journalism, but also went beyond that to teach me about firefighting, fire science, and how the world of firefighting will shift with increased fire seasons due to climate change.”
Sydney McGarr ’27
As manager of the Journalism Institute, Hutchins works to ensure that his students are prepared to cover all kinds of news, including Colorado-specific events like wildfires. One of the reasons this class was created was because the Journalism Institute noticed that Journalism students were graduating, getting hired at news outlets throughout the region, and then being asked to immediately cover wildfires. Hutchins wants to make sure these students are prepared for future jobs.
“As wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive, we want to make sure students who go into journalism after college are better equipped to cover them,” Hutchins says. “If they get a job at a local newsroom out here in the West, it’s likely they will have to cover a wildfire pretty early on. That’s just the reality.”
And that is exactly what happened to Charley Sutherland ’24. After graduating, Sutherland got a job at the Jackson Hole News & Guide, where he had to immediately cover a wildfire. Luckily, Sutherland had taken Hutchins’ Reporting on Wildfires the first time it was offered, which had prepared him for this wildfire journalism opportunity.
“When I arrived, the Fish Creek Fire was burning north of Jackson and I jumped in to help cover the massive blaze in my first couple weeks at the paper,” says Sutherland, who majored in Political Science and minored in Journalism. “In Reporting on Wildfires, we talked a lot about how being a reporter, particularly in the West, involves writing about wildfires, especially as our climate warms and we face the consequences of decades of poor forest management. My job is to report to on government and we have an environmental reporter. But environmental issues seep into all of the beats at the Jackson Hole News & Guide, in part because we live in a community on the doorstep of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Wildfire is a part of life and therefore a part of journalism.”
Sutherland says that one of the main lessons he took away from his classes with Hutchins is the importance of using language that the general public can understand. In other words, journalists should try to refrain from using field-specific terminology. “When I went up to Togwotee Pass to report on the fire, the public information officer and safety officials used a lot of fire-specific terminology that I didn’t understand and knew readers wouldn’t either,” Sutherland says. Therefore, Sutherland made sure that in his story about the fire, he used language that the general public could understand.
Students in the first Reporting on Wildfires class got the opportunity to meet Fernanda Santos, author of The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, and students in both classes got to meet Michael Kodas, author of Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame. Students in the first class stayed overnight at Grand Lake, interviewing people about the East Troublesome fire. And students in this year’s course got to spend a day at the Colorado Capitol in Denver, where they met with and interviewed Colorado Governor Jared Polis. Both classes also traveled to CSU Fort Collins to discuss current wildfire mitigation studies with wildfire scientists.
For a class assignment, Beau Toepfer ’28, an Environmental Studies major and Journalism minor, wrote a story for The Aspen Times, which was featured on the front page. Toepfer, who works as an intern for The Aspen Times, says that reporting on wildfires is becoming an incredibly prevalent issue in today’s news, especially in smaller, local papers in the West, so this class is especially important now.
“Having the S-130 and S-190 certifications is important because, by taking those classes, you learn more about wildland firefighting and wildland fire behavior, which improves your reporting and helps you deliver accurate, timely, and understandable information to the public,” says Toepfer. “That information can be lifesaving in rapidly developing situations like a wildland fire or a potential urban conflagration.”
“As a student who is majoring in Environmental Studies and minoring in Journalism, taking the wildfire course with Corey felt like a no-brainer,” says Michaela Ocko ’27. “The truly unique part of the course was the fire camp. We learned not only how to write about wildfires, but also how to fight them. The course encourages me not only to cover wildfires in a journalistic setting, but also to be on the front lines battling them.”
The Journalism Institute has been incredibly successful since Director and English Professor Dr. Steven Hayward established it in 2018.
“We needed it for a long time,” Hayward says. “And students really responded.”
Journalism Institute alumni have gone on to work as local, state, and national-level reporters, winning state and nation-wide awards. In 2023 alone, Journalism students at CC produced almost 200 stories for professional local news outlets. That same year, the Colorado Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named Hutchins, who manages the CC Journalism Program, Educator of the Year. Additionally, the Denver Post has chosen a CC student as its breaking news intern for the past three sessions in a row. Fifteen Journalism minors graduated this spring.
The Journalism Institute requires students to take four classes and complete both an internship and practicum in order to graduate with a Journalism minor. Hutchins emphasizes the Institute’s firm belief on the importance of connecting students to local newsrooms.
“Staffing and classes for the Journalism Institute are currently supported only by limited endowed and gifted funds, so we have to be creative about how we can get journalism blocks on the schedule each year and which ones to include,” says Hutchins, who added that a Gates Family Foundation grant runs out next year, so the Journalism Institute is currently trying to fundraise to keep the department staffed and offering classes. “The NSF grant would enable us not only to teach Reporting on Wildfires in the future but also to offer paid summer internships for students.”
For more information on the CC Journalism Institute, please visit its website or reach out to Corey Hutchins.