By Joe Arney

An important part of being a good enterprise reporter is a willingness to keep digging, even when the soil seems shallow.

Sometimes literally.

A news feature on agrivoltaics—the practice of growing crops beneath solar panels—that Gabe Allen and Tyler Hickman published in The Colorado Sun not only helped validate both students’ interest in environmental journalism, it won them Best Scalable Innovation in Planet Forward’s 2023 Storyfest competition.

“Our instructor, Erica Hunzinger, talked about the importance of following your curiosity,” Allen said. “She encouraged us to go down this rabbit hole, even though it was weeks of digging before we knew we had a hook.”

Storyfest showcases student work that seeks to understand and illuminate innovations for how to best care for the planet. As part of the students’ win, they spent five days aboard a polar vessel in Iceland, learning how the country is addressing conservation alongside a team of naturalists, photo instructors and others.

It was a valuable experience for two graduate students who chose to study journalism at CMCI thanks to the focus and opportunities made possible through its Center for Environmental Journalism.

“We’re trying to inform people first and foremost, but through these human interest stories, you’re also showing the impact these stories can create, and how they can bring about change,” Hickman said.

For the Sun feature, Allen and Hickman visited Jack’s Solar Garden, in Longmont, to share the story of founder Byron Kominek’s three-year battle to get a solar installation on his farm. The students’ persistence was rewarded when, deep into their investigation, a bill to expand agrivoltaics was proposed. Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law in May.

“When you’re digging and you hit the wall, that just means that you have to go around it or go over it—find a new angle,” Hickman said. “That’s something all our professors really drilled into us.”

Hunzinger, also public health collaborations editor at The Associated Press, called the pair “driven and ambitious.”

“You could see their growth in their in-class questions and discussions and in their assignments,” she said. “When these two decided to pair up for the final project, I knew we were in for a curious and thoroughly reported treat.”

For Allen, the opportunity to do enterprise-level reporting was a major motivator to attend grad school.

“It was fun to really dig into that piece—to spend a month talking to so many different people, from politicians and scientists to the farmer on the ground,” he said.