It may be summer, but the UM J School is hard at work.

The UM campus is quiet, but our students and faculty are on the air and online with important new stories.

The Meth Effect is taking a fresh look at the resurgence of meth in Montana.  Their web site is live at metheffect.com, and their audio pieces will be part of a special presentation on Montana Public Radio Sunday, May 21 at 6pm MDT.  These pieces are the product of a unique collaboration between Professors Jule and Lee Banville, and MTPR.

For more than a quarter century, the J School’s Native News Honors Project has produced pathbreaking journalism about life on Montana’s reservations.  The latest issue hits the web at midnight, May 19 with an in-depth examination of the Indian Health Service.  The website is fully of photos and videos from the team’s multimedia efforts. Those who prefer hard copy should look for our insert in the May 20 edition of the Missoulian and the Billings Gazette.

The J School’s Montana Journalism Abroad project continues this year, as 14 students accompany Professors Nadia White and Denise Dowling to Japan.  Their website  is already bursting with great content that sets up their big story: an examination of the effort to resettle areas contaminated by the nuclear accident, earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11, 2011. For the next three weeks, the Japan team will be working on additional stories, and they will be posted to the website.  Learn more about the trip from their YouTube video. 

If all of that great journalism doesn’t fill up your free hours, get ready for the latest installment of the Crown Reporting Project.  Graduate students Olga Kreimer and Beau Baker are teaming up with veteran journalists Laura Krantz and Michelle Niijhuis to report out two new stories about environmental issues in the Crown of the Continent region.  I’ve been sworn to silence, so I can’t tell you what they are working on.  But follow us online and look for their work in High Country News, our partners this year.  The UM Journalism School  is proud of all of our summer projects, and we will be bragging about them all summer.