Erin Schulte has joined Inside Climate News as its first senior editor for networks and partnerships, assuming responsibility for amplifying the award-winning nonprofit’s national reach and developing its climate and environment reporting networks in the Southeast, Midwest, Mountain West, West Coast and other regions.
Her position, which will also include directing coverage and articles editing, marks a significant expansion aimed at taking the 15-year-old digital newsroom to new levels of ambition, impact and financial sustainability. Joining Schulte, in two other newly created positions, are Victoria St. Martin, assigned to cover health and environmental justice, and Charlotte Mikk, who becomes major gifts officer on ICN’s development staff.
“We are working to revive a crucial part of the degraded news ecosystem and deliver superbly produced climate journalism every day to an ever-expanding audience,” said David Sassoon, founder and publisher of Inside Climate News. “We are immensely fortunate that these deeply experienced professionals of high accomplishment are joining our team to fill these vital new roles.”
Schulte, based in Washington, comes to ICN from Fast Company and Hearst Digital Magazines, where she was a senior editor. She was also the executive editor for Huge, the Brooklyn-based digital agency. She began her career as a city hall reporter at The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock and later became a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering the U.S. equities market for WSJ.com.
Schulte has also served for three years on the board of directors of the Center for Public Integrity, the Pulitzer-prize winning nonprofit investigative organization based in Washington, D.C.. A South Dakota native, she has a degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“For this critical new senior editing position overseeing networks and partnerships, we were looking for the journalistic equivalent of a five-tool baseball player,” said Vernon Loeb, executive editor. “We found one in Erin. She cares deeply about stories, writers, collaborative work across newsrooms, alternative story forms, and climate change, our intensive newsroom focus. She also has years of experience as a writer, editor, manager and team builder.”
St. Martin, based in Philadelphia, comes to ICN after a 20-year career in journalism, during which she has worked at The Washington Post, The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana.
St. Martin is also a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She currently teaches at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. A New Jersey native, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women.
“Vicki is a diligent pursuer of the bigger picture, and imbues her work with compassion for the people at the center of the facts,” said Managing Editor Sonya Ross. “We consider both essential to our storytelling about health and climate change, and we are excited by the possibilities she brings to our team.”
Mikk joins ICN after serving as a major gifts officer for the Environmental Defense Fund, where she worked closely with EDF’s senior program and executive staff in Washington, D.C., Boston, Raleigh and Austin to grow fundraising capacity in regional markets.
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Donate NowMikk, based in Alexandria, Virginia, has worked in development since 2000 and has focused on annual giving and major gifts fundraising for leading environmental and cultural nonprofits including Conservation International, the Smithsonian Institution and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Also a New Jersey native, Mikk has a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in arts management from the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University. She currently resides in Alexandria with her husband and daughter.
“Charlotte brings a brand new capability to our fundraising team, crucial to our strategy for sustainable growth,” Sassoon said. “We’re eager for her to apply her talents and experience in support of everything we do at ICN to strengthen the practice of climate, environment and justice journalism.”
About Inside Climate News
Founded in 2007, Inside Climate News is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that provides essential reporting and analysis on climate change, energy and the environment for the public and decision makers. We serve as watchdogs of government and industry and hold them accountable for their policies and actions.
We have earned national recognition for our work and many of the most prestigious awards in journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize. We have built one of the largest dedicated climate newsrooms in the country and continue to expand collaborative local reporting networks in many regions of the country. We are committed to training the next generation of journalists of color and strengthening the practice of environmental and justice journalism.
