Talking Shop: Telling the Climate Story Locally

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and not fact checked for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Kyle Pope: Hey everybody. Welcome to another Covering Climate Now Talking Shop. I’m Kyle Pope. I’m one of the founders of the Covering Climate Now, and we’re really, really happy to have you here today. We’re going to talk about telling the climate story locally, but first, for those of you who don’t know, Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of journalists from all over the world. We’re organized by journalists for journalists, and our job simply is to help one another do a better job of covering what we see as the defining story of our time.

We’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to CoveringClimateNow.org. Just one programming note from us this year, Covering Climate Now launched the Climate Station, which is a program to help local TV stations across the US improve their climate coverage. All sessions take place on Zoom and they’re customized for each market. So whether you’re a meteorologist or a general reporter or an assignment editor or a digital producer, we’re joining all these people together and helping us find ways to connect the climate story with our audience to give them solutions. And we would, again, love to hear from you. We’ll drop a link in the chat with more information on that. But again, please reach out.

So let’s get onto today’s session, which will be led today by David Schechter. He’s the national environment Correspondent for CBS News and Stations with nearly 30 years of local news experience and a commitment to helping local newsrooms elevate their climate coverage. He’s well suited to guide our panelists through an hour-long conversation about how to cover climate locally effectively and how to engage audiences while they’re doing it.

So, David and our panelists will be talking for the first half hour. The second half hour will be devoted to your questions, so please start thinking about that. For now, I’m going to turn it over to David. David, over to you.

David Schechter: Thank you, Kyle. This is an exciting opportunity. We’re really got a great panel here today to talk about local coverage of climate change. We know it’s a global story, obviously, but because it affects every community in the world, that means it is also a local story and covering it as such comes with a unique set of challenges, but also rewards because we know from polling data that audiences crave more climate reporting, especially when it relates to their communities.

So how do you make your reporting resonate with your local audiences? That’s probably what most people want to find out today. Today’s Talking Shop webinar will help you learn to find the local climate connection, discover new ways to humanize and localize your stories and report on solutions in your community. So please join me in welcoming our experts today.

Kaitlyn McGrath is a meteorologist for WUSA 9, the CBS affiliate in Washington D.C. She takes pride in breaking down critical weather information for her viewers. Kaitlyn recognizes the toll that climate change is taking on her region, and she aims to educate viewers on what needs to be done to adapt to a changing climate.

Helina Selemon is a science reporter at The Blacklight, the award-winning investigative unit of the New York Amsterdam News where she reports on public and environmental health issues along the climate, COVID-19, gun violence beats. She’s trained journalists in news and investigative research skills at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and the Ida B. Wells Society and UC Berkeley.

And Kale Williams is an environment reporter with KGW TV News in Portland Oregon. He previously covered environmental issues along with breaking news and trending topics at the Oregonian and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the author of The Loneliest Polar Bear, a book published in 2021. Welcome to our guests. We’re going to have a great conversation today. I do want to start with the idea of a success story, that there are many challenges in reporting on climate, maybe even particularly in local markets, and we’ll talk about that for sure.

But I think it’d be worthwhile just discussing a project that you worked on that came out well, and you think some of our colleagues here today might be able to learn from that. So let’s start with Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn McGrath: David, thank you so much. I’m so thrilled to be a part of this conversation. And I’ll start by saying that I think the best climate stories are the ones where you can make the big picture a little bit smaller and educate your audience because oftentimes climate stories can seem overwhelming and packed with science that can be hard to digest. But more often than not, there’s typically a way that you can make that information easier for folks to consume. So take the topic of warm and global temperatures. Pretty broad, right? But there are a lot of ways that you can stem stories from this topic.

I recently did a piece on how warm and global temperatures, specifically warming winters, are impacting local fruit production because fruits actually need cold temperatures to effectively produce fruit. So I started with research on how this is impacting my region locally because while warm and global temperatures, of course, are a global concern, there are different local impacts.

And in my research, I found that here in the DMV, the DC, Maryland and Virginia area, it’s impacting pretty much every pitted fruit. And while doing this research, I came across a group of scientists from Virginia Tech who are working on two solutions to this very problem. The first is genetic modification. Altering trees before they’re even planted in orchards. And the second is a topical solution that can be applied to trees that have already been planted. Both of those solutions help with the goal of helping fruit trees combat late spring frost, because one of the main problems that fruit trees turns out are having is that they get this false sense of spring with warming winter temperatures, and then inevitably you get that late spring frost, which can damage fruit.

Now, this story kind of hit all of the angles that I aimed to hit when it comes to covering a climate piece. It makes complex science a little bit easier for our viewers to understand. And it really is a personal story because I’ll go out on a limb and say that a lot of people like fruit. And at the end of the day, we’re talking about the fruit that you buy at your local grocery store, your local’s farmer’s market, and how climate change is impacting the availability of that fruit and also the cost as well. And what I like the most, I think about this piece is that it offers a solution. I told the viewers what is being done about this very problem. So that’s just one example of what I look for when it comes to covering climate change locally and how you can make the big picture a little bit smaller for viewers.

David Schechter: That’s a great story. Those chill hours are critical, how many hours it can be cold in the wintertime. But did you feel like you reached the audience with that story, or did you hear anything about … Sometimes you do a good job, you don’t hear about it, but do you feel like that was a way to connect with the audience in a way that maybe they didn’t expect climate change to be reported to them?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Exactly. And I think it was that kind of element of surprise, right? Because oftentimes you don’t think about how climate change is impacting the fruit that you eat. But I did receive, I would say, exceptional feedback on social media, right? Because oftentimes you don’t hear from the folks that are watching on TV. But when you post these stories on social media, I heard from a lot of folks just really interested in the topic. And I think it got a lot of folks thinking about all of the ways that climate change might be impacting our day-to-day lives that we might not necessarily think of.

David Schechter: Great. Helina, how about you? You got a good success story that you’d like to share?

Helina Selemon: Sure. And thank you, David. I’m excited to be talking with all of you about this. Last summer I was working on … I realized that heat was an issue that could be brought to an audience at our paper that hasn’t gotten much climate news. So I’m a year and a change into this job, and we haven’t had a climate reporter before. So I was thinking about where do I start. It got into some explainers about heat island effect and different ways people are feeling the heat.

And our publication focuses a lot on the root causes of gun violence as well. And my editor encourages looking for intersections wherever you can. And we were wondering, is there an intersection there? And I thought, “I don’t know, that might be. Maybe.” So I started to dig, I found a study, a recent study that looked at the 100 most populous cities in the US and found that we can link a certain percentage of the shootings that we experience in the United States to the temperatures of the day.

They were exceptionally high temperatures of the day. And it’s something we see even in cold temperatures, like cold seasons, where if there’s kind of a spike in a warmer temperature, we also start to see, unfortunately, a spike in shootings. We could attribute about 7% nationally on average of our shootings to temperature. And in New York where I’m based, that’s twice that. It’s 15%. So that was a quick draw to look locally and see how are we responding to this? I appreciate that Kaitlyn mentioned solutions. I felt like I couldn’t leave people there with just that fact or that there was this interesting relationship, even though I think some people kind of intuitively know that when things get hot, people are more agitated, more people are out. We kind of know this.

But I was looking around and I actually found a solution in Philly not too far away, where a group out of the University of Pennsylvania was taking the cleaning and greening approach. They were finding vacant lots all around the city, hundreds of them, cleaning them or treating them with green space, working with the Horticultural Society of Pennsylvania to green these spaces appropriately and see what happens, maintain them over a few years. And what they found was that violence in those areas, gun violence and other forms of violence in those areas dropped by I think 29%.

David Schechter: Wow.

Helina Selemon: And did not transfer. Did not just shift over to another neighborhood or to another area. So I was interested in figuring out how … I thought that was an important … It felt like a two birds, one stone story of these things are linked, but there are also solutions that potentially address both. And so that story led to a lot less conversation with the audience. I would have loved more, but funny enough, selfishly, lots of conversation with other journalists and other sectors I didn’t expect to reach out to.

I was invited to talk to laborers at a labor conference like health and safety workers and such about heat and about how to talk to journalists about the things that they’re experiencing. Our paper hosted a panel, a community panel. So we invited people in to talk about these intersections with gun violence. So it’s focused on gun violence, but we got to bring that to our audience in that place.

David Schechter: That sounds like a fantastic story. And I guess as a follow up there is, you’ve talked about solutions and Kaitlyn also talked about solutions, and I know a lot of journalists do, obviously. But why was it important that that story, not just reveal the bleak intersection, but also look for something else? Why did you do that?

Helina Selemon: I did that because when you can, it feels like a good thing to do for your audience, to show them where they can be empowered or more than informed and empowered with the information you give them. A lot of climate news is bleak, and I didn’t want to also … In starting to bring more of this coverage to this outlet, I didn’t want to just leave it at that when there were people doing something about it. I think it’s very important to beyond, I mean, most of our stories will be bleak, but knowing that asking ourselves who’s doing something about it is just as important because people want to know, and people engage more in stories when they feel like they know or there’s something to do about it.

I think we help navigate our audiences away from avoidance when we give them a chance to feel engaged in the process and not distanced and helpless from it.

David Schechter: Well said. Well said. Kale, how about you? You got a highlight you can share?

Kale Williams: Sure. Once again, I want to say thanks for hosting this and thanks for Covering Climate Now for putting this on. Probably the story I’m most proud of had to do with a polar bear that came to Portland in 2016. I was working at the Oregonian, got a press release about this polar bear cub. It was going to be a 600-word, cute animal story. And my editor encouraged, he is like, “Well, they say that polar bear was raised by zookeepers. Figure out how rare that is and what more we can do with this.”

So I started looking into it. Turns out it’s exceptionally rare. So my editor kept kind of prodding me, telling me to look a little deeper. Found out that she was one of just a handful of polar bear cubs that have been successfully hand-raised by zookeepers, because her mother abandoned her about six days after birth. This bear’s name was Nora. And so from there, the story just kind of branched out into all kinds of places that I never thought it would go. We started tracking her family tree back to the last time any of her relatives were in the wild. We figured out that her father had been rescued as a cub in Alaska after a native Alaskan hunter had fallen into a polar bear den, killed the mother, and rescued this cub, which ended up fathering Nora, this polar bear.

So I thought, wow, that’s incredible. Let me see if I can track down this Alaskan hunter, which I ended up doing. And I was very fortunate to have the support of my editors that I never could have imagined. They ended up sending me to Alaska to talk to this native Alaskan hunter. This was 30 years after this incident happened. But he gave us a ton of detail about what that was like. And it was really important in that story to sort of expand it beyond just there is this polar bear with this interesting story of how she came to be in captivity, but the hunting practices of native Alaskans are changing along with the climate up there. And we really wanted to sort of look at the question of how human beings relate to the natural world in a more holistic sense.

And so we were able to take this press release that would’ve been a short story on this cute little polar bear cub, and we turned it into a five-part series that ran over a whole week, ended up producing a 30-minute documentary about it that touched on not only polar bears in captivity, but the moral question about whether it’s right to keep animals in zoos, how climate change is impacting the cultural practices of the folks who live in the same regions as polar bears and a whole bunch of other stuff. And I was really happy with how it turned out.

And I think it’s one of those things where you can take, like Kaitlyn was saying, a story that’s local and globalize it. This is a thing that is happening here in Oregon. During that time, we had these crazy wildfires here, we were seeing all types of extreme weather across the country, and we were able to incorporate all that to tie Nora’s story back to our local readers, but also have it appeal nation and worldwide.

David Schechter: What I love about this concept is that nothing really feels… Few things feel more local than your local zoo. They’re part of the community, it’s like the library or whatever. The zoo is a big deal where you live, and so that’s such a great hook, and then you’re able to stretch from the zoo to all these other places. How many stories, essentially local zoo stories, were you able to yield off this, off Nora, or with Nora?

Kale Williams: Well, we wrote up a few when she first got here at a newspaper that is always thirsty for clicks, whenever they would put out a cute video, we would write up a couple of hundred words. But that story, I was unique in the support that I had from my editors there, that story took the better part of a year to produce, and so for most of that time, I was keeping my powder dry to put it all into the series that came out, without trying to reveal too much of my hand in the meantime.

David Schechter: So I think what’s nice about our three guests, our panelists, is that you all work, I believe, in supportive environments, where this covering climate change is encouraged, and I suspect we’ll have people with us today who have a variety of levels of support where they are, hopefully more support than less. But I’d like to talk about the concept of a pitching a story, and if you can take it from the perspective of, I got to pitch this… I know you have a lot of projects going on, but from the idea of, hey, we’ve got to go in and pitch this story right now, it’s 9:30 in the morning, and I hope we get to do this today or tomorrow or whatever. And I know that’s not always how you pitch a story. But what are some of the ways that you approach management and editors to tell them a story about your story, so that they understand that it’s not just a think piece or it’s a climate change story, but it’s a local story about people or communities and what they’re dealing with? And I guess let’s start with Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I do consider myself so fortunate to work in a newsroom where these stories are encouraged, and it’s never really a surprise that myself or a colleague might want to cover something climate or environment-related. But I would say, when pitching a climate story, I always try and anticipate the, “Why should we care?” or the, “So what?” question you might get from management. Because I think sometimes, especially as a meteorologist, a climate story might seem interesting from a scientific perspective, but might not resonate or seem interesting to someone looking at it through a different lens.

And then, we have to localize it, from a local news perspective, that’s really what’s important to our management. So finding a way to take a study or some new research that was just released about climate change and making it local is really what, not only management, but also our viewers want to see. So going into these meetings, or these pitch editorial meetings, with an idea of how you can localize it I think is going to be your best bet to getting it on air. And that’s research that I would obviously come prepared with, and you can really work on that Rolodex well ahead of time to have those contacts in the community, those people you can turn to when it comes to quickly turning any kind of climate or environment story.

David Schechter: Kale, how about you?

Kale Williams: Yeah, when I’m going to try to pitch something, I generally try to think of two different ideas, one person and all the people. And the one person is you want somebody compelling who can lead your narrative, you want somebody who either has interesting things to say or an interesting backstory, and then you need them to be able to appeal to all the people who are going to be in your audience. And if it’s not a compelling person, it has to be an issue that they deal with in their everyday lives, whether you’re talking about renewable energy and utility bills, or extreme weather and preparation, whatever it is, you need to have somebody who can lead the story in interesting character, and something that’s general enough that it will appeal to a broad swath of your audience.

David Schechter: Thank you. And Helina, how do you think about that issue of what your internal audience will respond to as a well-framed idea?

Helina Selemon: I’m with everybody here on the preparation ahead of pitching your editors, and bring people into it, talk to people in your community and find out what they know or what’s really irking them, and I think that’s always… It’s harder for an editor to push back on stuff that’s like, “People in the community are saying this, and this is how we could possibly frame it in a larger conversation.” With pitching in general, I try to know what my minimum story is, and if I can, or if it’s a story I’m like, “I’d like to do more with, please give me more time,” I try to drop what the medium or maximum story is too when I’m pitching, so that way, I know at least what I can guarantee, like, “I can get you this in maybe this window of time, but with a little bit more, I think the conversation is, or the story can be,” fill in the blank.

David Schechter: You present a menu, “I can do X, Y, or Z.”

Helina Selemon: Kind of, yeah. Sometimes it becomes a multi-course meal, so you’ve got to be careful with it. Make sure you’re doing this with… I try to be as transparent with my editor about how interested I am in this in terms of length of time. I got into a story following a press release about cooling assistance, and how systems to help people with cooling assistance had already run out 24 days into last summer, and that became something that kicked off. I had a minimum story there to let people know about that, but it’s now become a part of what I follow now as a reporter. So I think it can be actually a very welcomed multi-course meal over the course of your reporting career, yeah.

David Schechter: Yeah, I like the idea of having a story that can keep on giving, and then your editors know that and they start thinking that way too. “Well, how are we doing with the cooling centers? Let’s figure this out.” A couple more questions, and by the way, we’re getting a lot of nice questions now from our participants, we look forward to answering some of your questions here in the next half hour. A specific question for Kaitlyn about being a meteorologist, so you’re a meteorologist who reports, which is amazing, and for anybody who is on this call who works in news and where there are meteorologists, can you talk about a little bit about the role at the local level that a meteorologist can play in interacting with the editorial process, with other reporters, with planning? What can and do meteorologists bring to the table, and how can others access that?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great question. I think first and foremost, as the meteorologist, we have to hold our colleagues accountable to the science. It can be really easy to regurgitate information that you might read about climate change or something a source tells you, because we all know that headlines can be catchy when it comes to climate science. But as the, quote, unquote, “station scientist,” it’s our job to make sure that we’re holding the station to a standard of accuracy and excellence when it comes to incorporating climate information, because it is complex, we can’t expect everyone in the newsroom to understand it or be knowledgeable about it, that’s our job.

I also think we can help our colleagues by identifying a climate connection that might not always seem obvious. That’s why I really do encourage meteorologists to really be present during editorial meetings, and help guide colleagues when there might be climate information that can be incorporated, or an angle that they might not be thinking of, or maybe they’re snagging an interview with a local leader about an unrelated topic, but you know that person has an interest in climate change, you can ask that colleague to maybe pass along a few questions on your behalf, and then incorporate that into your coverage as well.

David Schechter: Yeah, so you’re at the intersection of a lot of different things, and having that knowledge is really important. With our last few minutes of our group conversation here, I would like to talk a little bit about how you deal with backlash as local reporters. It just comes with the territory. Yale University, in their research, finds that it’s maybe about 10% of the public are dismissive, which means they don’t accept climate change and they are susceptible to conspiracy theories, and they’re also very loud. And like we say, you don’t really hear it from a lot of people, like, “Yeah, that was a great story. I really loved that.” That’s pretty rare, and you can’t really hang your hat on waiting for those things to come in. But I’m interested in how the three of you deal with the negativity that comes with this role, and maybe you could address if you’ve seen it changed, and advice about how people should respond or not respond to these kinds of questions that they get. And let’s start with Helina.

Helina Selemon: I’ve been pretty lucky in not getting too much heat, no pun intended, for the stories I’ve done, and I think part of it is just the nature of how we do the work, where a lot of our work is long-form and long-term. So I haven’t gotten a lot of direct heat, and I think part of it’s like if you’re on an ongoing beat, where you’re producing this and putting this in front of folks, you might get it more.

That said, I haven’t shied away from any… Especially when people squirm at it, I don’t shy away from using climate change language in my stories, because I don’t want to leave it to be the intangible boogeyman here. It’s very much something where our job is not to scare people with the word, it’s to make people feel more familiar with the words and familiar with how this feels. And people know this is shifting, and I think our audience knows this is shifting, they may not know exactly how or how they’re feeling it, but it’s up to us to help validate that shift and put a name to the things that they’re feeling.

David Schechter: Kale, do you get some of that blowback, have you experienced that?

Kale Williams: I get less of it now that I’m at a TV station than I was when I was at the newspaper, and I think part of that is because every story had my email at the bottom, where you could just click on it and write whatever you wanted. But I also think that the reaction to climate reporting has evolved, as the nation’s understanding of climate change and how it’s gotten a little bit more mainstream over the last five years or so. I think that you see less outright denial now, and more skepticism and pushing for delays in action on this type of thing, which is a type of denial. But I think it’s also important to differentiate between people who are skeptical and trolling, and people who are skeptical but trying to engage in good faith.

I would have people who would respond to some stories that I wrote and be like, “This doesn’t sound right. What’s the basis for this assertion you’ve made here or there?” And in most cases, I’d be like, “Well, I got it from this person, and here’s the paper that they wrote that underlies this assertion that I made in the story.” And sometimes, those people would be like, “Oh, I see the point you made. I don’t really agree with you, but at least you’re able to back up the assertions you were making in your story.” And then, there were other people who were just like, “This is all fake news, you’re a bum,” probably in worse language than that, and those people I would just ignore.

David Schechter: Yeah, I have… Thank you. Kaitlyn, I have a don’t-engage-too-much policy, but one response only, if I’m going to respond with anybody, but I suspect you, being a broadcast meteorologist, have probably the most active Twitter account of anybody on this panel. Is that true, and do you get a lot of flak?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, it’s interesting what really sets people off. Sometimes I’ll post something, anticipating some kind of backlash, and get positive remarks. Sometimes I’ll be surprised at what really seems to tick the internet off. But I will agree with Kale in that the group has gotten much smaller, but they are just as loud. And oftentimes, I feel very torn, because part of me doesn’t want to engage and poke the bear, but part of me feels so strongly about the subject, and I don’t want my lack of acknowledgement to be perceived as being afraid to speak out, or let the, we’ll call them loud folks, feel like they’ve won. But I typically don’t respond or engage.

That being said, I will respond if someone has a question about something I’ve said and I feel like it’s coming from a genuine place of curiosity, not a place of trying to start this online battle. But David, I’m also with you in that it’s typically a one response, and then just ignore it.

David Schechter: Yeah, good. Well, thank you. We’re going to move now to some questions. I’ve got a nice queue of questions here, and I’m going to intuit who I think they’re actually for. This is from Rochelle, this would be a good question for Kale. “Hi. I’d like to ask about turning a press release into something bigger or more locally-based. What sort of guiding questions would you ask yourself when you get a press release from, say, a scientific journal like Nature and you want to ground it?” So I don’t think the press release you got initially came from Nature, but how do you look at press releases, whether they’re local or national, and trying to localize the national?

Kale Williams: I think it all comes back to people. People are going to be at the heart of every story, your audience is going to connect with the characters in the story. And so, if you get a story about how climate change is increasing precipitation rates in your general area, you might look for somebody who suffered some flood damage in the last deluge that came through, and that’s just the last deluge that came through, and that’s just the first thing that popped to mind. I mean, for me, when the press release came from the zoo, it was just looking for something unique and then being willing and being provided by management with the time to really dig into it to see how unique it was and to see whether there was more. The more we kept digging, the more we kept finding, that’s not always the case, but you’re never going to know unless you’re given the opportunity to keep poking around.

David Schechter: Kaitlyn, do meteorologists appreciate being pitched on climate data? That’s what Brooks wants to know.

Kaitlyn McGrath: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And it varies depending on what the data is or the research is. Sometimes it’s something that warrants a bigger climate piece or a big report on it, but sometimes it’s something that I can just incorporate in my day-to-day forecasting. So depending on what the information is, we might handle it a little bit differently, but knowledge is power, so unless we have that knowledge, we can’t do anything at all with it.

David Schechter: This is probably for the group. Reid wants to know, when you’re working on a climate change impact story, like higher temperature means X for local Y, how important is it for you to say, “Climate change is the cause of these temperatures and fossil fuels are the main reason for this” somewhere in your story or report? I call that making the climate connection. I guess it’d be nice to talk about the subtlest ways you can do that and the most aggressive ways depending on how you need to do it. But I suspect everybody here does that in their reporting. Helina, how do you handle that? And also if you see that another story isn’t making that connection, do you get involved?

Helina Selemon: I do say that. I do care about, and we care about it at my paper, getting at the root causes of everything in our stories. So we don’t shy away from saying what the root causes of the problem is, but we also, I think, add to it. I think in addition to saying climate change and what’s behind climate change, we’re talking about structural racism. We’re talking about redlining, divestments in neighborhoods and additional root causes that are all playing together to create the problems that we’re reporting on. So absolutely don’t shy away from it. I think what we aim to do is expand on that. We don’t just leave it at the one sentence if we can, we try to expand and make sure we’re also illustrating that climate connection.

David Schechter: Kale, you may have even a tighter, depending on your stories, you get these windows that might even be shorter. How do you handle making the connection in your stories?

Kale Williams: Yeah, I mean, when you’re working with a two-minute television package, two and a half minutes, sometimes all you really have time for is one line where you say, “These warmer temperatures are caused by climate change, which is caused by humans burning fossil fuels or primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels.” Sometimes you need to put some hedge words in there or other people will get a little hinky. But I try to do that in every story, and I certainly look at other stories that our station produces, and if that’s not in there, there have been times when I’ve spoken up and been like, “Hey, I thought we could have, in this story, made it a little more implicit that this wildfire that we’re talking about while not directly caused by climate change, these types of events are made more likely and more intense and more frequent by climate change.”

David Schechter: And Kaitlyn, are you able to do that when you’re in front of a green screen. That’s even more challenging to be talking about the weather and then be like, “And then this thing about climate change” and then go back to the weather? That can be hard.

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say oftentimes if I’m in a time crunch, I push to our website or I’ll push to my social media and I’ll say like, “Hey, it’s a complex topic. There’s a lot more to dive into. For more information, go to our website, go to my social media for a greater conversation about it.”

David Schechter: Thank you. So we have a question that came in, and I think this is good because it is a good local hack or whatever, but how do I retell the same story many times without losing the audience’s attention? This person’s talking about the story being need for sustainable practices. There are many buckets that are deep and have a lot of things in them, and you have to keep, “Didn’t I just hear that story you’re talking about, sustainability? Can we do something else?” And you might actually hear that from management as well. What does it take to differentiate local stories that maybe seem like they’re a branch of the same tree, Helina?

Helina Selemon: I think it’s a good question. Follow the updates. Ask your sources what’s new. Keep up with the folks that made it into your story and keep looking for them to expand your network of people to talk to about what’s new. Go to events, I’d recommend. Give yourself the opportunity to find new nuggets of information and inspiration within the same story. And I think more people are turning to doing this, but create a series out of it. If you’re going to be reporting along the same lines, make that intention known to your audience. Let them know that you’re like, “We’re going to be following this and bring you stories and see this through.” And maybe it’s a five part series, maybe it’s a weekly series.

It takes some design and work with your management, but I think doing that and I think my last tip would be to consider giving it new form. Especially if you’re getting bored with the exact format that you’re producing the story. If you have the flexibility to think about ways to bring your stories off the page, off the screen and maybe in front of your audiences and your community at local institutions, your libraries or community centers, your houses of worship are these spaces that could host your work in an event or in some interesting ways that elevate some of those stakeholders in your community that are in your story. I think there are ways to get imaginative and expand on a story to get more out of it.

David Schechter: And you made me think about this summer, I wanted to report a lot about extreme heat and human health, and so I have couched it as an occasional series like, “How much more heat can we take?” And then finding different ways to answer the question, which challenges me, as a reporter, to go, “I got to answer that in a different way for this story and I got to answer it in a different way the next story,” and I think gets to that question that we just heard. Kale, anything there resonate for you with how to keep going back to the same well, but tell a different story?

Kale Williams: Yeah, I mean, that’s something that I’ve… So I moved from newspapers to television about a year and a half ago, and one thing that I’ve been learning is how different the audience is. And I’ve already come up against that in just the 18 months that I’ve been here where a story that I told when I first got here, I need to tell it again, and I go to my managers and I’m like, “Didn’t we already do this?” And they say, “Yeah, but our audience is so fluid that anybody who saw it the first time may not remember it this time. Might be a completely different audience.” And so you obviously don’t want to tell the exact same story over again. You’re not just going to copy paste your script from the first one into your show for the next, but I think that you can break a story down into its component parts.

Maybe the first story, you took a broad overview of whatever the problem is, and then if you need to go back to it, maybe you just spend a day in the life with a person who’s experiencing the problem. Maybe you do a Q&A with somebody who’s working on the solution. You talk to legislators to see what they’re doing to approach this type of thing. And while all of those things might have received one or two lines in the original broad overview, you can expand on each of the components to tell the story in a different way.

David Schechter: Great. And I got a question here from Gerd May, and this is probably good for Kaitlyn, do you have some good examples on series on local climate coverage? How do you frame them? I guess, do you serialize or brand your work so that it has a hook or a handle of, to what Helina was talking about too, that we’re going to do this thing again now?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, every Monday and Wednesday at 5:45, we have our Environment Matters time slot. That’s a sponsored segment that our viewers know they can turn to twice a week, every week for that specific content. But then occasionally, we’ll do a more specific series. But I would say just ensuring your viewers that it’s something that they can get with regularity. And if you can get that support to say, “Hey, it’s every Monday at 5:45,” that’s great, but I think even just branding it in its own way so it has its own open or its own differentiator from the rest of the newscast really can help it stand out.

David Schechter: Have any of you worked on misinformation or disinformation? Kat wants to know how do you approach that? Does that come up in anybody’s work?

Helina Selemon: Not really.

David Schechter: No, not so much? And that sometimes feels like that’s less of a local story, misinformation, disinformation, because some of the actors are coming at that from a higher level. Let’s see, what is your approach for assessing stories that are pitched to you directly from individuals, companies, organizations, who are wanting to elevate a specific climate solution that they are working on? I’m getting a lot of emails about, we’re doing something amazing, and I personally, I’m not sure that’s the source of where I want to get it from, or it requires a lot of extra due diligence to be like, “What is this person pitching and what’s the underlying information there? That can eat up a lot of your time? But do you guys have an approach for saying, “Oh, this just came over the transom. Let me take a look at that. Kale, what do you think?

Kale Williams: Yeah, I mean, you’re not wrong that inboxes just stack up minute after minute with people saying, “Hey, I’ve got this novel new way that we’re going to confront this problem that’s been confounding humanity for 30 or 40 years.” And generally, I also approach them with giant blocks of salt, but that’s not to say that none of them are without merit. We just started something at my station called the Solutions Project where we’re trying to do a lot more solutions-based reportings for all aspects of problems in our community from gun violence, homelessness, drug use to climate change. And I think you have to be really careful with environmental solutions reportings, because there is such a propensity for folks to want to greenwash. And something that might be sold as this game changing revelation may actually just be somebody trying to get funding for a startup.

And so I think that your approach is not wrong in being like a lot of them should be ignored, but you have to, I mean, it just takes a little bit of experience going through those and going down a little bit of the path and then realizing that this is not for you to identify those before you start going down the path. And sometimes that means calling up an unaffiliated expert who’s like, “Hey, I heard about this potential climate solution. Does this sound like it has any truth to it, or is this going to be a wild goose chase?” And once you have a couple of those folks in your Rolodex or in your contacts, so I’m not making myself sound old, you can rely on them to help you ferret out which ones are worth pursuing and which ones aren’t.

David Schechter: Thanks. I know we all want to have impact in our work, and it’s such a huge problem. And then when you talk about it at the local level, you’re probably not really dealing a lot with mitigation of climate change. That’s a lot of adaptation stuff that could be happening at the local level. You could agree or disagree potentially with that. But my question for everyone is how do you deal with the down part of, is this really making a difference? I’m putting my drop of water in the ocean here. Or do you feel like because you do it at a local level, that you actually can see the shoots of people’s understanding increasing because they’re watching you? It’s to balance for everybody because it’s not all great, and it’s not all difficult, but it can be both. I’m just wondering how you deal with the ebb and flow of, am I making a difference here? Let’s start with Helina.

Helina Selemon: Besides talking to my therapist? Aside from recommending that, I think of how do I… It’s such a good question. I’m really at a place where I think the reporting, I still get excited when the stories get out and I see how people receive them. And what’s really cool about working in local news is that the audience trust is at a different level than I think national and international outlets get. I think we have something unique at my paper, and I think at a lot of our outlets, and maybe a lot of all of your outlets where you reach a specific audience and they’ve known you for a while, and so they trust or at least fond of the name or they have an attachment to the place. And I think that that helps a lot. And that buoys me when I’m doing this. Aside from talking to friends and doing all the things, you’ve got to take care of yourself in doing this work.

But I think that being local and doing this feels different than being at a news agency or being international to me, because I feel, in a way, you do wonder even more where that ripple effect is happening, where if you’re at local news, you could find out, you can find out, and you can talk to people, they’re there. And so, I’m buoyed by the fact that it’s local and there’s some local trust at our publication.

David Schechter: I can relate to that. I feel like when I would do local climate stories, you knew what people were thinking and even people around you or in your community or in the newsroom, but at a national level, it’s really hard to tell if that’s connecting with anybody. Kaitlyn, you’re standing right there in front of the audience and talking to them in a real direct way. Do you have that same ebb and flow, up and down?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah, I mean, it’s certainly…

David Schechter: … ebb and flow up and down?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly not lost on me how small our local impact can be, but I do think there is something super special in it being that kind of local, tight-knit feel of really being able to connect with the community and educate the community. I know it’s, in the grand scheme of everything, a very small step, but I think the small steps count too. And I think at the end of the day, you’re starting a larger conversation, or at least I like to think we’re starting a larger conversation, because maybe Joe Smith at home watches the story and tells his family about it and then they tell their friends. So I like to think that even if it is just a small local story that it has the potential to have a greater impact. I don’t mean to say that to sound naive, but I think having that outlook can really give you the inspiration to keep chugging forward whenever it feels like at the end of the day these stories really matter. I personally, I really think they do, so that’s what keeps me going.

David Schechter: You need to be optimistic, I think. Kale, are you optimistic?

Kale Williams: Am I optimistic? No. I’m a pessimist by nature in all things, not just when it comes to climate change, but that doesn’t mean that… I mean, climate is not pass/fail. It’s not like there… While we love to talk about tipping points and cliff edges and that type of thing, this is a problem that exists on a gradient. And so when I do get pushback from folks that say, “Oh, how much of global carbon emissions is Oregon responsible for? And how much will our cap and trade program actually impact global accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?” You have to be like, “Maybe it’s not much, but we are one piece of a giant puzzle,” and it seems, at least to me, if I have any optimism in me, it’s that more and more states, counties, countries are starting to take this seriously. And when they do, that pushes us farther back from whatever imaginary cliff there is. And like I said, it’s not pass/fail, and so every little step that you take makes a difference.

David Schechter: Well said. I give you a question here from Micah Green who says, “Do you have any advice on how to train younger, more general assignment reporters on how to approach these topics? We work with a small staff on the Alabama Gulf Coast where so many stories are climate related.” I mean, first of all, I know the climate station from Covering Climate Now is training local newsrooms. We personally at CBS have developed something called the E-Team where we train monthly, we’ll have one tomorrow, reporters, managers, meteorologists on some of the basis of climate change and work on collaborative projects. And so I think there certainly are some resources there. I can imagine some things popping up here pretty quick in the chat. But I know Helina, you do training and you do newsroom training, and maybe not that specifically, but how can you or do you or have you interacted with younger general assignment reporters to say, “Okay. Let’s take a look at that and what this could have been or could be.”?

Helina Selemon: Sure. I think I approach it similar to almost any other story in that I have my students produce what I call a network map. It’s where they draw out, okay. In the circle… Grab a piece of paper, a pen. Anyone could do this. Circle what your story generally is, and then draw out what you need in this story to make it a compelling story for people to engage with. And your friends can help you with this. Your colleagues can help you with this. And you start to say, “Okay. Well, money, data, voices, people in the community, people…” It’s actually a good fun activity. And it becomes your checklist for what to do when getting into this story.

I think that that becomes… It’s leaning on your colleagues and telling them. It’s like. “I’m telling a climate story about this.” Sometimes folks can help you out. Even if you’re not in a newsroom, if you’re a freelancer, I would reach out to friends, reach out to colleagues about… Reach out to family, like “I’m doing a story about this,” and see who knows a little bit about, “Well, what does that mean? Can you…” You might actually get more helpful feedback than you expect.

And I like to turn to… We teach at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. We teach how to build a beat. One of the first things you do is learn community reporting. And so one thing we do is make sure folks, excuse me, go out and find… Oh, I just blanked on my thought. No. Oh. They all have to report on the specific what we call community districts in New York. And so that area is theirs. Each community district and each community board that runs that district has a statement of needs. So if you search community profiles, NYC, maybe there’s something less technically available in your city or state, but it’s an outline of what communities are raising as issues that are important to them. And you can get your students to find climate, your reporters, to find climate stories within that. Sometimes asking, “Is there a climate story there?” from everywhere they’re currently pulling can be really helpful.

David Schechter: I’m curious if any of you have started to think about or had done any reporting on the local impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act and money that might be flowing to your community, because that’s this connecting of this big national story and really an international story down to like, “Hey. There’s a battery client in our state and here’s what it’s doing.” And then the political ramifications of reporting on a piece of legislation in potentially a positive light and trying to walk that fine line as well. Kale, have you dealt with any of the flow of that money into Portland?

Kale Williams: Yeah, I have in a couple different ways, one relating to the legislature and one outside of that. In Oregon, they passed a big package of bills last year focusing on the carbon emissions from buildings, which is a big source here in Oregon and is pretty much everywhere. And one of the ways that they’re hoping to tackle that is by using a bunch of this IRA money to fund upgrades and to fund incentives and to fund rebates for things like heat pumps and upgraded electrification to any number of different household appliances. And so I covered that and basically the way the proponents of that bill were talking about it were, “We can invest this small amount of money in setting up these programs now to reap this massive amount of money that is coming down the pipeline since the IRA was passed.”

I didn’t really face any pushback. There were a few people who were against the bill in the legislature, probably folks who you would naturally imagine would be who are just against most government spending, but none of them really had problems with it based on the contents of the bill itself. It was more like, “Let’s just not spend this money.” The other program that I reported on in regards to the IRA was I’ve done a number of stories on salmon habitat restoration, and there are all kinds of grants also coming down the pipeline through both the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that are going to be… There are so many grant opportunities out there for programs like this. And the folks that I talked to were like, “Yeah. We’re basically having to just write grant proposals full-time now because we know all of this is coming down the pike.”

David Schechter: Helina or Kaitlyn, have you dealt with this at all?

Kaitlyn McGrath: Yeah. I would say in a similar vein to Kale, I think tackling things like the IRA are a great way to localize it and educate our viewers not only on what all the IRA offers, but also what it means for our community. So maybe that’s reaching out to, for me, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and saying, “Hey. What does this mean for you guys? And what does it mean for our community and for our environment?” And I think that’s a really unique way to highlight both the political side of things, but also localize it in a way that’s a little bit easier for viewers to digest as well. And chances are it’s going to come out with a cool story that impacts the audience in a way they might not realize.

David Schechter: Helina, have you seen the money in the community or know that it’s coming?

Helina Selemon: I got to dig more into it, but that is something I’ve been interested in. It’s like how these federal grants and federal dollars are trickling down to our states. At one point when the EPA, I think the Justice40 funding or the Justice40 program and the funding that came out of the EPA for environmental justice grants came about, I was looking to see, “Well, who’s historically gotten these grants? And what are they up to? Is it enough?” You know, understanding what’s happened since 2015 or 2017 or now for the new folks who are going to be getting it? Are there pain points there that we can illustrate for folks, whether they’re fighting the sewer systems that they’re dealing with or looking at how… Or coastal erosion or… New York City has all of these really unique problems, both city and coastal problems. And so it’s one of those.

I’ve spent time talking to the folks who’ve gotten these grants and understand, “Well, what is this for you now that you have it? What are you doing with it? Is it enough?” I think my focus on, are these adequate steps roll… once it’s at your community, is it enough to roll everything it needs to forward? What does it do? What does it not do enough of? I think I like to illustrate that when I come across it. And what would it cost really to fix something that is there? And is there accountability there for local government to step in or someone else to step in? Who’s most responsible?

David Schechter: Great. I’m going to give Kale the last word on this and then we’ll send it back to Kyle.

Kale Williams: Yeah. I thought Helina just made such a good point. Any time you have this amount of money, it’s the largest investment in climate adaptation and mitigation that we’ve ever seen, there’s going to be waste and fraud and abuse and there’s going to be people out there who are looking for a handout and then not spending it in the right way. And I think it’s really important for reporters to be looking for those, as well as the happy stories about projects that couldn’t get funding before and now can. You’ve got to look out for people who are just looking at this as a come up and to hold them accountable too, because any money that’s not spent making the problem better is making the problem worse.

David Schechter: Kale, Helina. Kaitlyn, thank you so much. What a wonderful panel. Great discussion about local issues. Climate reporting at the local level’s where it’s at. Let’s keep it up. And let’s send it back to Kyle.

Kyle Pope: Yes. Thank all of you. That was fantastic. Really, really appreciate it. And a super important conversation. I mean, this point that Helina made about the trust that exists between local news and its audience just makes the fact that you all are bringing that climate conversation into a local audience so, so important. And it’s also just a reminder of how local news is so powerful to bring this global climate story into people’s lives. I mean, we heard today about how it affects the fruit we eat. We heard today about how it affects the animals that we see at the zoo. We heard all the way up to how it affects gun violence in our communities. I mean, this is where the climate story comes to life in people’s lives. So what you all are doing is so important. So thanks again.

Just one more note. Somebody mentioned training. I want to give one more plug for our work at Covering Climate Now, which you can go to our website. Take a look at what we’re up to. Especially take a look at the climate station, which we’re offering to local TV stations all over the country. It’s free. We’d love to have you. So please reach out. Thanks again. Thanks again to all of you. Thanks to everybody who attended. We hope to see you again soon. Take care.