Way back in 2017, I saw Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, give a presentation about the climate crisis and the public’s still-limited understanding of it. People really only need to know five … Read more
Over the past year, the Nieman Foundation has invited some of journalism’s most decorated thinkers into conversation on topics ranging from climate coverage to crime reporting to the pandemic’s impact on the health and medicine beat. As 2021 closes out, … Read more
Robert Boyle made every effort to repeat his experiment successfully. It meant killing yet another bird. But to convince his colleagues that animals need air to live, Boyle had to show them. “Take no one’s word for it” — … Read more
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999 with a focus on environmental issues. Her 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” posits that human activity has brought the … Read more
We journalists pride ourselves on being good notetakers—astute documentarians—but earlier this year, out in the woods, I met an old man who puts all of us to shame. His name is John O’Keefe. Beard, white. Sweater, green. His gray eyes, … Read more
Even when news was breaking about the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, climate change was generating 18 million interactions on social media—more than guns, immigration, and the economy. So, what made the last two weeks of September unique? Kids. … Read more
These are heady times for anyone scrutinizing climate change coverage. Take the volume of coverage, for example, which seems to be on a sharp upward trend this year. More than 300 media outlets were reported to … Read more
The assignment was simple: find out what energy companies knew about climate change, and when they knew it. InsideClimate News (ICN) reporter Neela Banerjee was initially skeptical they’d find any significant evidence that fossil fuel companies knew about the … Read more
In 2002, Mark Schleifstein and a team of reporters in New Orleans wrote “Washing Away,” a five-part series in The Times-Picayune that predicted the devastation of Hurricane Katrina three years later. When the series ran, the public was … Read more
