Croakey is one of a handful of Australian media organisations to join a global media initiative putting a sustained focus on the climate crisis ahead of a landmark international Climate Action Summit in New York on 23 September.
The Covering Climate Now initiative is co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), in partnership with The Guardian.
It is aimed at “breaking the climate silence that has long prevailed within too much of the news media” and doing “justice to the defining story of our time”.
As one of more than 170 media outlets joining the initiative (the list of participants is below), Croakey invites our readers, contributors and social media followers to engage with these critical discussions, using the hashtag #CoveringClimateNow.
As outlined below, we are hosting a range of activities as part of our #CoveringClimateNow contributions, and we welcome your suggestions for these.
On Twitter, contact @MelissaSweetDr or @mariemcinerney or @CroakeyNews or email: info@croakey.org.
The plan
- During the week of 9 September, our rotated Twitter account @WePublicHealth will have a different guest tweeter on climate and health each day. If you are interested in guest tweeting, please contact us with a pitch about what you’d like to cover.
- During the week of 16 September, we will publish a series of articles on climate and health, covering local, national and global perspectives. Please let us know if you’d like to contribute, or have suggestions for articles. This series will be compiled into an e-publication that will be freely available online via the Croakey Publications portal.
- #CoveringClimateNow Twitter festival: from 8am AEST on Tuesday 24 September. This event will create a platform for sharing diverse expertise around climate and health solutions. Guest tweeters will have 15-30 minutes on the program. These tweets will be compiled into a post at Croakey and also published as part of the e-publication. Please let us know if you’d like to participate.
Longer term
The climate crisis demands that we all transform how we work and live, and shift our priorities.
At Croakey we are committed to stepping up our coverage of climate and health but we need your help to do this.
We have launched a crowd-funding campaign via the Patreon platform so we can provide regular, in-depth coverage of the health impacts of climate change, taking a local, national and global approach.
Funds raised through this Patreon account will go to a dedicated public interest journalism fund to put a sustained focus on the health impacts of climate change.
Please help us to produce stories that will help inform the health sector, policy makers, communities, families and others about how best to respond to this public health crisis.
Statement by Covering Climate Now organisers
More than 170 news outlets from around the world have now signed up for Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by CJR and The Nation aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.
All outlets have committed to running a week’s worth of climate coverage in the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Sept. 23. At that meeting, the world’s governments will submit plans to meet the Paris Agreement’s pledge to keep global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.
“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many organizations from across the US and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists—to report this hugely important story.”
Covering Climate Now now ranks as one of the most ambitious efforts ever to organize the world’s media around a single coverage topic. In addition to The Guardian—the lead media partner in Covering Climate Now—CJR and The Nation are joined by major newspapers, magazines, television and radio broadcasters, and global news and photo agencies in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Among the outlets represented are: Bloomberg; CBS News; El País; the Asahi Shimbun; La Repubblica; The Times of India; Getty Images; Agence France-Presse; national public TV broadcasters in Italy, Sweden, and the United States; most of the biggest public radio stations in the US; scholarly journals such as Nature, Science, and the Harvard Business Review; and publications such as Vanity Fair, HuffPost, The National Observer, and The Daily Beast. Covering Climate Now also includes a wide array of local news outlets and non-profit websites reporting from Rhode Island, Nevada, Turkey, Togo, and dozens of places in between.
“Collaboration with like-minded colleagues makes both journalistic and business sense in today’s media environment, and The Nation is happy to encourage such collaboration and proud to share our climate coverage as part of this exciting initiative,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation.
All of the news outlets participating will decide for themselves how many climate stories to run during the September week of coverage, and what those stories say. The only requirement is that the participating outlets make a good faith effort to run as much high-quality climate coverage as they can—and thereby signal to their audiences the paramount importance of the climate story.
Some of the outlets participating in Covering Climate Now will share their climate coverage with one another, though this is by no means obligatory. Many outlets will publish or broadcast only stories they themselves produce. This decision is entirely up to each participating outlet.
A full list of participating outlets follows.
Columbia Journalism Review (Co-founder)
The Nation (Co-founder)
The Guardian (Lead Media Partner)
Wire Services and News & Photo Agencies:
Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Bloomberg
Getty Images
Newspapers:
The (Colorado Springs) Gazette
The Christian Science Monitor
The Daily Hampshire Gazette
DigBoston
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
The National Catholic Reporter
The Oklahoman
The Philadelphia Inquirer & Inquirer.com
The Portland Press Herald (Maine)
The San Francisco Chronicle
The Seattle Times
The (New Jersey) Star-Ledger & NJ.com
La Nacion (Argentina)
The Queen’s Journal (Queen’s University, Canada)
The Toronto Star (Canada)
The Varsity (The University of Toronto, Canada)
La Tercera (Chile)
The Hindustan Times (India)
The Times of India (India)
La Repubblica (Italy)
The Asahi Shimbun (Japan)
The Nepali Times (Nepal)
The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand)
Público (Portugal)
The Straits Times (Singapore)
The Mail & Guardian (South Africa)
El País (Spain)
Trouw (The Netherlands)
The i Paper (The United Kingdom)
Magazines, Journals, and Digital News Sites:
The Alpinist
Bay Nature
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Bustle
The Chicago Review of Books
Circle of Blue
Civil Eats
Climate Desk
CQ & Roll Call
The Daily Beast
DeSmog
EcoRI News
Ecosystem Marketplace
EcoWatch
Ensia
Green Philly
Grist
Harvard Business Review
Honolulu Civil Beat
HuffPost
IEEE Spectrum
The Intercept
In These Times
InsideClimate News
IPS Inter Press Service
Jolon Indian Media
Journal for the Planet
Lapham’s Quarterly
Literary Hub
Mongabay
Mother Jones
New Mexico In Depth
The New Republic
Newsweek
Nexus Media
The Oklahoma Observer
PassBlue
PublicSource
Quartz
The Real News Network
Renewable Energy World
Rethinking Schools
Rock and Ice
Rolling Stone
Science
Scientific American
Sentient Media
Silica Magazine
The Shoestring
Slate
Sludge
StateImpact Pennsylvania
Talking Points Memo
Teen Vogue
The Texas Observer
The Tuscon Sentinel
Truthout
Vanity Fair
VICE Media
Vox
VTDigger
The Weather Channel Digital
WhoWhatWhy
Yale Climate Connections
Yale Environment 360
Croakey Health Media (Australia)
Eureka Street (Australia)
Revolve (Belgium)
My News Brasil (Brazil)
The Coast (Canada)
Corporate Knights (Canada)
Kingstonist News (Canada)
Maclean’s (Canada)
The National Observer (Canada)
Planet Friendly News (Canada)
The Sprawl (Canada)
Taproot Edmonton (Canada)
TVO (Canada)
The Tyee (Canada)
Ojo al Clima (Costa Rica)
K-News.dk (Denmark)
Solidaritet (Denmark)
Clean Energy Wire & Klimafakten.de (Germany)
Correctiv (Germany)
KlimaSocial (Germany)
Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Germany)
People’s Archive of Rural India (India)
The Wire (India)
Newsweek Japan (Japan)
Newsroom (New Zealand)
The Spinoff (New Zealand)
Stuff (New Zealand)
The Daily Maverick (South Africa)
WOZ Die Wochenzeitung (Switzerland)
De Groene Amsterdammer (The Netherlands)
The Confidential Report (Togo)
NewsLab Turkey (Turkey)
BusinessGreen (The United Kingdom)
Climate News Network (The United Kingdom)
The Conversation (The United Kingdom)
Immediate Media (The United Kingdom)
Nature (The United Kingdom)
Physics World (The United Kingdom)
Television & Multimedia:
CBS News
Democracy Now
PBS NewsHour
The Years Project & Years Of Living Dangerously
WFAA (Dallas-Forth Worth, Texas)
WJCT (Jacksonville, Fla.)
WNET’s Peril and Promise (New York, N.Y.)
News18 (India)
RTÉ’s Brainstorm Project (Ireland)
TG1/RAI (Italy)
TVNZ’s 1 News (New Zealand)
Politically Aweh, TV news show (South Africa)
Swedish Television / SVT (Sweden)
Radio & Podcasts:
Climate One (podcast)
Elemental: Covering Sustainability (regional collaborative of NPR stations in Denver, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Los Angeles, Calif.)
Global GoalsCast (podcast)
Hudson Mohawk Radio Network (WOOC, WOOS, and WOOA, in Upstate N.Y.)
KALW (San Francisco Bay Area, Calif.)
KPCC (Los Angeles, Calif.)
KQED (San Francisco Bay Area, Calif.)
KUOW (Seattle, Wash.)
Marketplace Tech, by American Public Media
Nevada Public Radio
Science Friday, by WNYC Studios
The Allegheny Front, on WESA (Pittsburgh, Pa.)
WAMU (Washington, DC)
WBEZ (Chicago, Ill.)
WBUR (Boston, Mass.)
WFPL (Louisville, Ky.)
WHYY (Philadelphia, Pa.)
WNYC (New York, N.Y.)
WRAL (Raleigh, N.C.)
WWNO (New Orleans, La.)
The World, by PRI and the BBC (The United Kingdom)
Institutional
Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism
Boston University
Climate Matters & Climate Central (George Mason University Center for Climate Communications, and Climate Communications)
Journalist’s Resource (The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard University)
Solutions Journalism Network
Yale Climate Change & Health Initiative
Insper (Brazil)
blogdroiteuropéen (Europe)
Netzwerk Weitblick (Germany)
Manchester University (The United Kingdom)
The Lancet Countdown on Climate Change and Health (The United Kingdom)
Independent Journalists (outlets & affiliations listed for identification purposes only):
David Biello (TED Talks)
Rex Dalton (Formerly of Nature)
Mike Favetta (Founding meteorologist, WeatherPrep)
Dan Gardner
Paul Gross (Chief meteorologist, WDIV in Detroit, Mich.)
Stephen Leahy (Freelance biosphere journalist)
Bill McKibben
Mike Nelson (Chief meteorologist, Channel 7 in Denver, Colo.)
Don Paul (Contributing meteorologist, The Buffalo News)
Jake Price
Yereth Rosen (Formerly of The Anchorage Daily News)
Benjamin Ryan (The New York Times)
Dan Satterfield (Chief meteorologist, WBOC in Salisbury, Md.)
Peter Schwartzstein (freelance environmental & Middle East correspondent)
Alex Steffen
Isabel Seta (Brazil)
Sean Holman (Canada)
Tracy Sherlock (Freelance journalist, Canada)
Manka Behl (The Times of India, India)
Preeti Jha (India)
Marcello Rossi (Freelance environmental reporter, Italy)
Angelina Davydova (Freelance journalist, Russia)
Alex Thomson (Channel 4 News, The United Kingdom)
Michael Tatarski (Vietnam)
