Citistates Group

Keith Schneider is a nationally known writer, multi-media producer, public policy specialist, and communications and program development strategist. He specializes in environment, agriculture, energy, land use, urban development, and public policy, and currently serves as director of communications for the Apollo Alliance, a national coalition of labor, green, business, and government organizations seeking a clean energy economy in the United States.

Schneider, who is based in Michigan, is also a special correspondent for the New York Times, to which he has contributed since 1981, including a decade (1985-1995) when he was a Times national correspondent based in Washington, specializing in agriculture, environment, natural resources, energy, and transportation issues. He also serves as senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue (www.circleofblue.org) an independent online multi-media news organizations covering the global freshwater crisis, and publishes Mode Shift, www.modeshift.org, a widely read and much-quoted blog reporting on the convergence of technology, policy, economics, and changing patterns of metropolitan development.

For more than 12 years, Schneider was active with the Michigan Land Use Institute, the statewide research, communications, and policy organization that he founded in 1995, directed until 2000, and later served as editor, director of program development, and deputy director. The Institute, with 21 staff members working out of its headquarters in Traverse City and four regional offices, steadily built the case that economic prosperity in Michigan and every other state is closely tied to treating land, neighborhoods, and natural resources more sensitively and intelligently. Under Schneider’s guidance, the organization developed a nationally prominent independent online news desk that communicated its ideas in articles, commentary, special reports, multi-media storytelling, and on several Web sites, including the organization’s main site, www.mlui.org, attractin nearly 200,000 visitors a month.

Schneider is a leading innovator in applying the principles of original reporting and commentary to secure public interest advances; in his current Apollo Alliance and Circle of Blue roles, he is helping to design and oversee multi-media reporting teams, as well as the online dissemination program for a novel online research, communications and dissemination program to move the United States towards a clean energy and sustainable economy.

He has won two George Polk Awards, among the most prestigious in American journalism, for his national reporting. One was for reporting on the consequences of an environmental laboratory scandal that prompted market withdrawals of hundreds of dangerous farm chemicals. He has appeared on numerous national broadcast news programs aired by CNN, C-Span, National Public Radio, CBS-TV, ABC-TV, Westinghouse Broadcasting and others. He has delivered talks and speeches on more than 25 university campuses, and to public policy conferences, regional government planning and policy meetings, business conferences, and grass roots citizen gatherings in more than 40 states and three nations.

Last revised March 8, 2008