Welcome to fugitive journalism cast from the Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
I am Diego, aka this office. I am the manager at the Occupy Metro's name.
And in this episode, we will explore climate journalism with the help of three guests.
I am joined by Angela mendoza from Brazil, who was the environment reporter of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Ethan Benjamin, a journalist from the Daily Maverick in South Africa and a reporter with Philippine Daily Inquirer in the Philippines,
Angela, Ethan and Krisher. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having us.
Thanks for having me. It's great. It feels so fancy. Thank you for having me.
I'm glad to hear. Six months ago, the three of you were part of the group who joined us for the first cohort at the Ultra Clemenger Network.
And between January and June, we held online events every two weeks with 100 reporters, including three of you from all over the world.
And we hosted dozens of informal calls online. And our mission together was to collectively attempt to make climate journalism better,
more interesting, more effective, and more relevant to the audiences.
And over the course of the six months, I think we managed to think a lot about that,
and we managed to really explore the way climate journalism works.
We met with leading climate scientists and experts to learn how to questions,
reshaping our understanding of global health, of climate justice and find interesting a few.
And I think more importantly, we also debated and brainstormed how to meet the challenge of covering these stories
well and what the climate conscious newsroom on the future might look like.
And I want to start by asking you, can you tell us about your experience at the network?
How was it for you guys to have this experience six months with the court?
To be perfectly honest, I was so terrified at first.
I was very scared at the start of the programme, almost immediately when we began our classes.
I can already sense that most of my classmates have been covering climate reporting for years.
So because I wasn't really an environmental reporter at the start, I felt like a time before we even being here.
There were staff, there was Jessica, Stephen, Joanne, Johanna and of course my two classmates here.
They already seemed very entrenched in climate reporting already, so I was very scared of being out of depth with the lectures.
But then as the weeks went on,
I was very grateful that Reuters Institute and Oxford were kept their word when they first called for applications for this particular cohort that the
classes in the workshops will be tailored precisely so that people who don't
necessarily cover climate change will be able to understand the issue as well.
So it was very fascinating listening to how climate intersects with, for example, gender based issues.
So how women and children tend to be the most vulnerable during disasters, how it's linked to mental health.
What I also noticed is that each lecturer was very logically linked to one another,
and you never felt like this particular course was just shoehorned into the six month course just so you could fill up the schedule.
And what I also appreciate about the programme is that I've met people who otherwise would not have met if I wasn't part of the cohort.
So apart from Diego and Katherine and of course my classmates,
I never would have imagined sitting in a lecture being headed by the likes of Dr. Anthony O'Neil, Lorena Gonzalez.
So it's the kind of network that provides you opportunities to be connect with with sources
and people that you would that otherwise would not have been made available to you.
But to be clear, though, the Philippines does not have a shortage of resources.
We have a lot of brilliant scientists. We have a lot of community organisers and climate activists.
But of course it's very important to be linked with global experts so that you can be able to listen to what they have to offer,
listen to the global solutions that they have, and think about how it can be emulated and do local practises here.
Thank you very much. You had the point about the local expert was something that you need. Your colleague at the network also made a lot.
Ethan, how was it for you? It's hard to follow that. It was pretty comprehensive, but I agree with most of those sentiments.
For me, it's a unique situation where I come from a background where I was really a political reporter, parliamentary reporter,
and then I essentially I'd done only six months of on the beat of just the climate
change and the climate crisis and environmental reporting more generally.
And I sort of went on a process of like self-education, familiarising myself with the different terms and, and the science and understanding things.
So then when. I'm just now at the end of my first year, so the second half was with The O.C. Jian Jae in.
And what happened was that was sort of like the it in a sense, it was like a formal education,
just iterating what I had learnt and reinforcing it, but also expanding on what I thought I knew in the best possible way.
I always say that. I had no idea about attribution.
Quite frankly, I had no idea that attribution science had evolved or progressed to the point where specific extreme
weather events can be rapidly attributed to as an as an impact of global warming and climate change.
And that's just one example. I think it was just it was it was really good.
It was it never felt too formal. It wasn't.
I just I have nothing but good things to say, quite frankly.
I think it was it was an education in the best possible way.
So I'm really happy to hear that. And it is. And you are you are by no means a newcomer to environmental reporting.
How was the experience for you? Well, as my colleague said, this course was a unique and fantastic opportunity to learn with the training sessions,
to learn from colleagues from around the world and and to not work with them.
I think this is a this is a big this is a big benefit, great benefits from the programme.
But most of all, I think that this programme gave me some sort of binoculars to look into the future,
at least the future that I really hope that we can have when covering the climate crisis.
It's a future where journalists with diverse backgrounds working in different beats, not only in science or environment.
So these journalists will try to embed the discussions and the reporting on climate in everything to do so.
The most important lesson from this experience for me was that climate reporting can be this add on to our usual reporting.
So the crisis is very much real, right? So as journalists, our mission should be to help everyone take it seriously.
So it was very for me, it was very energising to see my colleagues from around the world.
So we were 100 journalists from different places in the world working tirelessly to meet this challenge.
And this reality is the reality that I want to see everywhere when when I use these binoculars.
This is the inspiration that the network brought to me.
And and I intend to continue to apply it to my work.
And, and everything I do is very running to here because of the of climate journalism.
Being in every desk of the newsroom is actually what we were aiming for when we started the network.
And I would like to hear from you, because you mentioned these for from all of you.
How did your approach to climate journalism change after six months of the court?
What what change in the way you saw how journalism covers climate change?
Well, I am in a very privileged position and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
So as an investigative journalist, I'm an environment reporter.
My beat prioritises the climate reporting and I have the full support of my team and my editors,
which is something that I could learn from this experience.
That's not something that's common everywhere.
So many journalists struggle with the lack of supports and and attention from their teams or their managers in different newsrooms.
So our investigations, they try to shed light on the impact of global food production on the environment and as we know,
is something that's often overlooked when we talk about emissions.
Right. But this experience gave me perspective and made me and made me think a lot about how we can convey the message, for example.
So it really opened my eyes to the fact that we we have to try and test an experiment
with no formats to actually engage people and catch their attention in a world where,
well, attention is is this is this golden coin, you know, that's not easily trade traded because we have so many stimulus everywhere.
And catching people's attention is is increasingly more difficult.
So I think my it changed my approach in the way I think about how to wrap up my stories and my investigations, how to deliver them.
I think this was this was my main takeaway. Thanks for that vision, Ethan.
Do you have any? Sure. Although it's hard to follow what Angela said.
But as she said, the chorus really got us to think about how we can experiment with the ways that we tell our stories.
For example, I think near the end of our six year programme, a six month programme, we had an audio storytelling workshop,
I think with Jessica that was very interesting to me because up until that point,
a lot of climate reporters have told us that climate change is first and foremost a visual story.
So often the way we imagine climate change is when we see photographs or videos of disasters, floods, tsunamis, etc.
So that workshop really opened my eyes in how we can use audio in being able to connect
deeper with our audiences in ways that photographs or videos may not be able to do that.
In fact, up until that point, I did not really think about how.
Viscerally powerful audio can be hearing the voices of disaster victims talk about sorry,
disaster survivors talk about their experiences and their resolve to move forward.
The use of background music or natural sound to hype and affect telling the stories.
I personally have not yet explored audio storytelling, so moving forward,
a plan to use that and incorporate that into climate reporting I will be doing with a newsroom.
Yeah, I love that. I love the torture as well.
And I love having Jessica's voice coming in in Portuguese in a way that doesn't come into the into the conversations in English and just Yeah.
Seen the variety of languages, people working in the network as well, which was really brilliant.
How about you then? Yeah, I think I'd say once again a lot to follow, although not everything that has been said already.
But I think I did also have the takeaway that the climate crisis sort of does intersect with so many other issues.
In South Africa, we have political issues, corruption, energy security issues,
rampant criminality and all of these issues that that that would otherwise crowd out the tension.
As Angela mentioned, you know, attention is a commodity, essentially, and it's hard to.
Grab that. And especially with climate change in in South Africa, it's seen as something that is a problem for future generations.
Maybe not so much recently. I think it is being appreciated more for the threat that it is today.
But there's so many issues that are happening today right now that are visible.
People are die children on dining taverns. I'm sure you've seen that news.
It's all over the world. There's so many things that people.
Understandably would focus on rather than this idea of the weather being more dangerous
or there being these climatic impacts or farming in the future being unsustainable.
Impossible. So. Linking.
Our activities of the day. And the stories of today with the into the climate nexus and allies and the importance and that it's possible.
And the possibility of doing that, I think, has been very good for me.
So now I can write the story about our power loadshedding, which is basically rolling blackouts that South Africa has,
where we don't have enough energy and the power goes out.
There's a political nexus, but there's also an environmental connexion because it's related to our coal power and all of this.
So I think, though, the network has been really good in helping me to think of creative ways to.
Claw back some of that attention that would otherwise be spread out amongst the myriad other issues in South Africa as.
Yeah.
I mean, an issue we had in the semester was how do we connect climate coverage with, for instance, the war in Ukraine, which was overtaking coverage?
You know, all the things I remember like several of our members, including you,
even where we look at at some point to cover the war in Ukraine out of your usual beat,
because there was just too much going on there that needed our attention as newsrooms and extension issues to challenge as we cover climate change,
how we connect climate change with all these were happening right now. You discuss the three of you, the network and the members.
And I think Angela mentioned also the community and in our piece were published yesterday at the Institute,
we discussed the value of positive communities in journalism.
And I wanted to ask, in your view and your experience, why is having a community relevant or important when covering climate change for reporters?
It's a tough one. I think that. Uh, just generally, I think.
If you mean like having a community, we can't operate in silos.
First of all, I think just this just goes back to my previous point about how.
Interlinked these issues all and then.
Trying to take on all of this. All of the egos and dealing with the egos and the stresses of.
Trying to process the complexity of the climate crisis and just the general news environment.
It's important to have these three sources that you can refer to for whatever your needs or I.
I'm not sure exactly how I would be able to articulate this, but I think it is important.
Great. Thank you. You can go ahead. But he said, I think communities are important for obvious reasons because they help provide support.
The journalist for covering one of the toughest subjects in the world.
We're living in a place where there are a lot of communities,
other groups that believe that climate change is not real, that it's a conspiracy theory.
And sometimes they go so far as to try to undermine the work that we do.
And not to mention corporations or lobbyists that engage in greenwashing, those who wish to evade accountability for the climate crisis.
And there have been many reports that environmental defenders and environmental journalists are often at risk in the line of duty because of this.
So obviously, having communities is a big help because then you'd have people who would champion your work,
amplify and broaden the reach of your stories, and vice versa.
And I think that such communities do not necessarily be exclusive only to journalists.
You can have environmental activists in that community,
fellow environmental defenders or other community organisers who can also help champion the work that we do.
So essentially, communities are great if you want to have people who have your back, and that can be a huge relief in the kind of work that we do.
Yeah, this is a really important Chris. Yeah, I completely agree.
I think as journalists, we have this mammoth challenge ahead of us.
Right. So covering cover in a climate crisis is a high stakes task.
But we are also people. Although some people would disagree.
But journalists are also people. And we also feel hopeless sometimes.
We also feel frustrated with politicians and their blah, blah, blah.
Sometimes the lack of engagement of our audience really hurts us because we feel powerless.
So having having a community and having peers who are there for you and and help you find your centre, I think is key.
So during this this experience with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, we had this brilliant surprise.
Well, at least it was really surprising to me that we had a session on on mental health,
for example, and it was a session where we shared our pains and our vulnerabilities openly.
So it was a it was an experience that really made it clear how how as journalists,
we lack a strong community and how this interaction and having peers to talk about the issues that we all face is so important.
So what's the importance of community? All its utmost importance, a thing to have as journalists?
Yeah. That section on mental health is one of my favourites for this semester.
It really brought home the sense that this is a shared experience by many of the reporters in the network.
All of them, I think. And that was also so nicely grounded on science.
So if Einstein brought his evidence and he was very empathetic, but also very same space, and I really liked that.
And I want to ask you, what was your favourite session or moment or fireside chats?
Because we had different kinds of workshops with fireside chats, with seminars.
Out of the sessions we had in the six months. Which one do you enjoy the most?
I think the mental health session was was one of my favourites,
but I really liked the engagement with the fireside chat that we have about politics and climate change.
So the polarisation of climate change that we had and everybody was very energetic and engaged with with the discussion.
So I learnt a lot because, you know,
I could understand how different countries face similar issues with the polarisation of the climate crisis and how the elections play.
A very important role will play a very important role to the future.
So these were one of my well, two of my favourites, but I really liked the climate justice session as well, so it was really, really powerful.
You think Angela and I share the same favourite glasses?
Do I? I think the reason why the mental health scores resonated with a lot of us was because for the entire six months,
a lot of the courses were geared towards how do we better improve our reporting?
And then suddenly there's this course that let's just look into ourselves and ask us to assess how the reporting is impacting us.
So it really hit close to home, and I guess that's the reason why it was one of the most impactful seminars at the impact.
And as I mentioned, I particularly like also the idea of storytelling workshop because I really like
it when journalists share the ways that they've experimented with storytelling.
And of course, it's really it's really inspiring to hear from one of our classmates,
not from one of the lecturers that were invited to speak for the programme,
just to hear how our own classmates have been dealing with the challenges of reporting climate change to their audiences.
And once again, not much to add, but all that mental health for me was, was, was, was really good for the reasons outlined.
It was just so important to just take stock of where you are mentally.
And it was was it was really affirming, quite frankly,
to just know that so many of my colleagues are experiencing similar mental states and that go through these challenges and that feelings and,
and the actions to events and news and the process of news is it's normal to to have that affirmation
was was was really nice but once again image it also to just say this I enjoyed attribution.
You mentioned you thought that was amazing just because I went in there unsure, uncertain about what I was going to learn or what?
Not exactly. Obviously I'd done the readings, but just the whole process of of learning about attribution was something that was completely new to me.
Like I was so focussed on understanding the science of climate change and climate justice and climate finance and all these other things.
And in my time prior to joining the the network,
but then going through that and being confronted with the attribution and just like seeing
this whole other aspect of science I didn't even realise had developed to this point.
And then finding out that I had a role in, in my own country, for example, with the city I'm in right now, Cape Town,
we had a major drought that was called Day Zero, which is basically at the point at which we would no longer be able to caption it on empty.
Basically, we no longer have water, the first major city in the world to completely out of water.
And that was a threat. And then I found out later through an attribution study, determined that that was made more likely because of climate change.
So I mean, it was a full a full circle for me.
I learnt about it and then realised I was a case study.
I suppose so, yeah. There was a lot, a lot to.
It's fascinating. I actually I've felt for years that climate science will, like, settled in a way.
And when retribution came along and listen to the audio, I was like.
Holy. That's just more can come in. I mean, this is a fantastic step.
And her action was amazing for this role. And yeah, the one from Jessica meyers from follows up on all the storytelling.
Yeah, it really shows the way you can bring story to a new format.
As you said. I want to wrap up with your views on how can.
What? How can journalism improve its coverage of climate change?
If you have something to share with other reporters covering climate change, what do they need to know?
How can we how can we make it better? I think one of the main takeaways I've learnt from discourse is that.
Climate change reporting need not be an overwhelming experience.
So of course, it always has to be rooted in the science.
And we always hope that the stories that we do, they do help for policies and programmes that will help resolve the crisis.
But it is first and foremost a human story.
And I think that's why we've taken so much faith in understanding the intersections of climate change,
not just the difficult aspects of climate negotiations, but like how climate change intersects with human experience.
So I think as soon as reporters understand how systems and structures can
either make a community resilient or vulnerable to climate related disasters,
then the better the storytelling will become.
Yeah, I agree with Krista.
I think humanising the coverage of climate change is key,
but I would add that we should we should rely on data and research on how the
audience reacts to climate reporting to make our our own editorial decisions.
So we know that there is climate fatigue fatigue with people avoiding this type of news.
And we have to respond to that.
I think I think we all feel as humans, we feel that well, we prefer to engage with threatening information if there's also a solution attached to it.
If a solution is provided or a way to address the problem is also provided.
So maybe, maybe we should also think about always inserting some ideas on how to fix these problems when we talk about it.
Maybe this is a long answer to say that solutions journalism may be maybe a way of of improving our coverage of climate change, in my view.
Thanks for this, Angela. How do you even. Yeah.
Just to add on what has really been said, I think the 17 people and the impact on on lives and is is is very important.
I think I think a lot of it can get caught up in the science and the the projected impacts.
But it's important to centre how this is going to impact people.
Who the most most vulnerable amongst us and not only the most vulnerable, but that is the case,
I suppose, if you are reporting from the Global South or South Africa, as in my case.
But I think. If you if you focus on if you should if you highlight those voices,
I think that does a lot of people tend to connect with the stories of others more than scientific or physical abstractions of science and.
I think another thing that we should. Be be wary of, as Jones is to.
The dumbest. I don't know if that's a word, but if we if we write about.
Make make every article seem like doom and gloom.
It does sort of. Turn people off of of the journalism.
And I think there are ways to do that.
It might be just adjusting your frame to maybe it doesn't necessarily have to be solutions journalism, but it can be.
I think one of the ways to do that is instead of saying this is the world is going to be way hotter and the sea levels are going to rise,
draw the taps, frame it in a way that says,
but we could also have a world where we have abandon to renewable energy and a world that's hyperconnected and they provide with green energy.
Those are equally possible realities.
That all depends on the decisions we make today.
So I think it's how we frame things that is important and just always trying to.
Gear authorities and and I'll focus towards the people who are all impacted, who are going to be impacted, how they're going to be impacted.
And then you've got to show people, your audience, why this is important.
You got to tell them why this is important, how this is going to affect them.
And I think the work will do the rest.
Just. Sorry, just one thing that came to my mind when Ethan was mentioning this.
How we frame this problem is that I think we were discussing this in the group
and with the other fellows some days ago about the cover of some newspapers,
how they are covering the heat wave in Europe and the selection of pictures.
This time is starting to feel more to feel different from what what has been done historically.
So usually newspapers bring people, you know, at the beach enjoying the sun during a heat wave, as, you know, as an example of of well,
use this pictures to show and to cover the crisis, to cover these extreme events,
whilst now we start to see some newspapers changing the mindset about it.
So they The Guardian, for example, was well,
brought a selection of pictures like a mosaic of pictures on people actually struggling with the heat wave in Europe.
So people suffering with the extreme weather to to show that this is a real problem.
So I think we have a lot to be done.
We have a lot to do, but things are starting to change.
And I think we also have to look into things more optimistically, I guess.
And I can see that there is a there's a will to change the way that we frame this.
So so it's it's it's good to see these examples, you know.
Just to add to what Angela said, actually, that was what I wanted to talk about earlier, that, you know,
from what I've noticed from our discussions in the past six months is that journalists already know how to improve climate coverage.
We've made it multimedia. We've lessened the jargon. We've explored a lot of formats to make it more relatable to engaging for audiences.
But I think what has to be done now is how do we engage our newsroom managers and get them on the same page?
Because we get to produce all the best reporting that we can produce massive, earth shattering investigations all we want.
But if our newsrooms do not provide institutional support,
if they carry on with the traditional way of framing climate change, then we might never get anywhere.
So I think both E.J. and I already made moves so that I think, if I remember correctly,
the applications for the cohort specifically also called for newsroom managers or people who make institutional decisions inside the newsrooms.
And I think that's one great way of involving the decision makers and get them on the
table so that they can better understand how urgent and how important the story is,
so that the journalists who actually cover climate change can get the story that they need and produce the stories that they have to do.
I'm going to leave with that idea of letting go of the newsroom managers and the decision makers,
because in the end, we need to restructure the way we conceive newsrooms and the way you approach climate coverage.
But I also want to take two other ideas. City of the Century and people's.
Deeply. People stories are climate stories, and at least Angela's metaphor of like using binoculars to just look into the future of journalism
that this is this is ideally how it looks like having reporters from every desk and every field.
Interested in covering climate change. Thank you. Even Angela and Fisher for joining us today is fantastic to have us here.
Podcast. Thank you so much for having us and we look forward to the podcast.
Thank you so much. It was a great, great pleasure to speak to you today.
Thanks. Thanks for the was a pleasure.
Our guest today where it Angela mendoza and the environmental reporter with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Ethan Redmon, a journalist for the Daily Maverick in South Africa.
And just looking to being a reporter for the Philippine Daily Enquirer's in the Philippines.
If you're interested in joining the Offshore Climate Journals Network, we will open our application for our general report in September.
Follow social media of the word institute if you want to find out more. Thank you all for listening to this episode.
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This was a feature of journalism, a podcast by the Reuters Institute.
I am the go to guy, so this will be good. Thank you.