"Speaking with climate reporters about staying on the beat—because, as Bill McKibben put it, “for better or for worse, by this time next year, there’s no doubt in my mind that climate coverage will be at the forefront.”"
"In late August, flash floods swept down a steep mountain valley in the Himalayas, killing more than thirteen hundred people in Nepal and Tibet. Thousands remain missing. The floods were caused, in part, scientists say, by the collapse of a glacier. Four years ago, Rebecca Hersher, a correspondent at NPR who has covered climate for the past decade, hiked a valley in Nepal to talk with residents about potential flash floods, related to a melting glacier, that could someday upend life there. The reporting she gathered, alongside colleagues Ryan Kellman and Pragati Shahi, became a portrait of a community in limbo. Upon seeing the recent news, “the feeling was just of being sick to my stomach,” she said, “because we knew this was going to happen. Not this specific disaster, of this scale, but the reporting we did years ago was driven by the understanding that flooding is a widespread risk in communities that are downstream of melting glaciers.”
Climate journalism can feel like a series of devastating yet foreseeable tragedies, all happening against a drumbeat of bad news—like the United Nations report this month that global temperatures will rise past a dangerous threshold. Meanwhile, climate desks at legacy organizations have shrunk or disbanded, including at NPR (Hersher was reassigned to another desk, although she continues to report on climate, among other topics). So how should we cover climate? Hersher said that amid everything, she prioritizes slower, human-centered stories because “disaster is headline-grabbing, but fleeting.”
Others urged ongoing preparation for the big, fleeting moment: “We’ve got a reporter every day on our staff on ‘Trump watch,’” Vernon Loeb, the executive editor at Inside Climate News, said. At the same time, consider the needs of an audience dealing with—as Emily Atkin, of the HEATED newsletter and podcast, put it—a “fried” attention span. In any case, meeting confusion with context is important because, as Katherine Bagley, the editor in chief of Grist, said, “a lot of coverage assumes that readers know what’s happening and accept the science and the urgency of it. But when you look at the polling of Americans, that’s actually not true.” As for good news, the public is hungry for it, Naomi Starkman, the founder and executive director of Civil Eats, said: “We profiled this regenerative chicken farmer, and that article did gangbusters.”"
