Keith Schneider knows what it's like to be pilloried by partisans in the environmental debate.

As the New York Times' Washington, D.C.-based environmental correspondent in the early 1990s, Schneider was viewed by environmental activists –- and by some fellow journalists –- as a "skeptic" whose copy salved the property rights movement and sometimes significantly downplayed public health concerns.

Those days are long over, however, as Schneider moves into the second decade of a post-Times career in what he readily acknowledges is an activist style of journalism.

As founder and leader of a Michigan organization that blends environmentalism with journalism, he now takes pride in his successes battling the very property rights interests he once was accused of comforting.

The Michigan Land Use Institute, which explicitly champions "smart growth" as a preferable alternative to "suburban sprawl," has grown since its beginning in 1994 into what Schneider calls "one of the largest state-based environmental groups in America."

MLUI now has four offices and a 15-person staff, including seven writers and two editors "intensively" involved in the group's centerpiece journalistic endeavor –- the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service. Schneider describes the service as "an action-oriented news desk."

The institute's staff freshens the website home page each Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday with a majo article from the news service. Other recent articles are also prominently displayed.

On Feb. 29, for instance, an article was posted that evenhandedly examined the pros and cons of a large new boat launch on a northern Michigan lake –- including quoting MLUI's own support of citizens calling for a smaller design.

Next to the text of the article was a link to a report by the institute, laying out its stance on the issue.

"We've got to be credible," Schneider said. "We don't want to be pure advocacy journalists just collecting ammunition for a point of view." That’s a criticism Schneider heard about some of his own work with the Times.

He acknowledges that the type of journalism that he and his colleagues practice differs from mainstream newspaper reporting principally "because we have a point of view, we have a perspective."

Schneider sees honorable antecedents in U.S. environmental and journalistic history. "It's the same thing John Muir did," he said, referring to the legendary 19th century naturalist, conservationist and writer who founded the Sierra Club.

"We use the tools of reporting and good writing and framing and dissemination to affect public policy," he added, noting that Muir's dispatches were published in the Century magazine, one of that era's leading periodicals.

What MLUI does is clearly regarded as at least some form of journalism by some prominent journalistic institutions in Michigan. Schneider was listed as one of the "leading journalists" who lectured in 1997 at a training institute on Great Lakes environmental issues at Michigan State University. And an article about his career as an "activist journalist" appears on the newspaper careers web page maintained by the Detroit Free Press.

Besides being featured on the MLUI website, articles by institute staffers are distributed to some 800 journalists. "Essentially," Schneider said, "the idea is to keep Michigan journalists abreast, helping them gather string on issues, providing all this background they can go to."

Some of the news service's articles are published elsewhere –- mainly in weekly newspapers –- and some also appear in some radio and television newscasts, he said.

In addition, MLUI publishes a quarterly magazine, produces special reports, and runs the Elm Street Writers Group, which sends commentary articles by its 15 member-writers to the four largest newspapers in every state, to about 50 websites, and to interest groups. About 70 newspapers have published these columns, offered free, so far.

The institute's budget has grown to about $1.5 million this year, with about 55 percent of its revenue coming from foundations and most of the rest from other donors, Schneider said. Foundations that have supported MLUI include Kellogg, Joyce, Wege and Alpern.

Within its separate "programs," the institute undertakes some specifically grant-funded projects, Schneider said, but about half of its revenue is unrestricted, "which allows us not to be guided by grant-funded projects."

Serving as executive director of the organization initially, Schneider said he wanted to avoid the non-profit malady known as "founder's syndrome," so he became program manager in 2000 and is now deputy director.

There is an ironic aspect to his career track –- from award-winning freelance reporting on pesticide problems, to national environmental correspondent at the Times where he drew environmentalists' criticism for his coverage of toxic chemicals and property rights, to his current identity as an environmentalist adversary of property rights groups.

But he sees no contradiction between what he does now and what he did at the nation's leading newspaper. "I'm an environmental journalist and advocate and public interest leader in the state of Michigan," Schneider said. "At the New York Times, I was just an environmental correspondent."

The growth of the property rights movement in the 1990s "happened to be a story that many in the environmental movement didn't want covered," he said, but he says he had a responsibility to report its "amazing influence" in various parts of the country.

"I had very disturbing conversations with prominent leaders of the environmental community, who said, why are you giving this (property rights) movement so much coverage."

But it was the nature of Schneider’s coverage, and not merely the fact of it, that most upset some observers, including some other journalists who felt he had sacrificed any claim to journalistic objectivity.

He evolved into an activist after an unexpected knock on the door of his Michigan home in 1994 by a representative of the natural gas industry, which led to the formation of a citizens coalition (forerunner of the institute) to press the industry for greater sensitivity to residents' concerns. "They told us to get lost," Schneider said.

In 1995, at a personal crossroad, he resigned from the Times to devote himself to work with MLUI. (He still contributes freelance articles occasionally to the Times, but only on subjects that are non-controversial, he said –- "nothing that's heavy-duty in the political battleground areas.")

Through the institute's investigative journalism, he said, "we've been able to show how the (property rights movement's) message is dangerous, how they put property rights above any other social value."