#mediamonday: Changing the Climate of Training for Journalists

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January 23, 2012 Cathie Glover

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Tornadoes touching down in ice storms. Tsunamis wiping out cities. Drought and famine destroying populations. All of these are stories the media has had to report in recent times. Journalists need to know how to write about these events, and training programs on environmental reporting are popping up in universities and media training centers across the warming globe.

The Society for Environmental Journalists’ website contains a wealth of information about the environment and governmental policies. Numerous universities have environmental journalism programs, including the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, the Center for Environmental Journalism at University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at Berkley.

Distance learning is becoming increasingly important in the realm of global media development. One of these distance learning initiatives is an online course on covering climate change. The course is an initiative by Internews and the Poynter Institute and is part of the Earth Journalism Network program. The course is designed to provide non-expert reporters and citizen journalists a firm grounding in the science and policy underlying climate change.

Poynter Institute, through its online learning site NewsU, provided the technical expertise in building the course, while Internews is responsible for the content and subject expertise. The site went live in 2009 and there are plans to translate it into Spanish in the near future. Internews is teaming up with regional and national media associations to spread the word about the courses to their members.

What journalists learn from the course:

How climate change affects various beats in a news organization
Scientific explanations of how the earth’s climate has changed through time are always subject to revision
Proposed solutions to global warming and its effects
How to write an unbiased story
Examples of stories covering climate change
Tips, such as where to find resources

As nine of the last ten winters have been the warmest since we began keeping records 130 years ago, there is solid evidence the earth is warming. Because of this, we can be sure we will continue to read about massive storms and tragic disasters. With programs like that of the Earth Journalism Network, journalists can be prepared to write these stories.

Cathie Glover (26 Posts)

Posted in: Media
Tags: #mediamonday, environmental journalism

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