Are Meteorologists Environmental Journalists?
The answer is Yes. No. Maybe … and it depends.
The answer is Yes. No. Maybe … and it depends.
InvestigateWest's Robert McClure gets into the (clean water) act by asking, "Four decades later, is our water cleaner?" You'll find shocking answers and a flood of ways to localize this issue.
Here's a sampling of coverage of recent extreme weather disasters, with particular focus on a few of the many enterprise stories that emanated from four clusters of events — the tsunami-caused crisis at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, drought and wildfires in Texas, death-dealing tornadoes in the Southeast and massive flooding in the Mississippi River system.
Miami-based radio news director Dan Grech recounts his journey covering the traumatic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, becoming homeless thanks to Hurricane Wilma, his subsequent training on trauma reporting, and shares his lessons learned with you.
Everything from the social media’s importance to the need for a detailed disaster plan — Robert A. Thomas, professor and director of the Center for Environmental Communication, School of Mass Communication at Loyola University in New Orleans, outlines 17 take-away lessons for journalists.
Reporters new to the climate change issue and those having to immerse themselves into it while also grappling with a range of other important environmental (and, given the nature of today’s newsrooms, also non-environmental) issues might try these "must see" resources and websites.
Rae Tyson reports there may well be a connection between odor-resistant socks and an emerging health and environmental concern.
For journalists covering major energy- and environment-related stories and natural disasters, the visually gushing BP Gulf of Mexico oil leak easily supplanted climate change and other national stories in the steadily shrinking news hole. Yet there are striking parallels between the sudden and in-your-face Gulf BP spill and the incremental and nonlinear climate change issue.
Did the American media fall short on stories about stolen/leaked scientists' emails and IPCC report errors? To gauge expert opinion on that question, SEJournal surveyed four close observers and analysts of the way that climate issues are covered.
SEJ has long called climate change the story of the century. Geoengineering is the new twist in this story and will be a key element — for good or bad — in decades to come.