Giving Compass' Take:

• Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, made a concerted effort to inspire hundreds of newsrooms to report on climate change. 

• What will be the impact on the broader public dialogue about climate change now that more media outlets are reporting on this issue? How might an increase in coverage impact climate change funding?

• Learn more about how media and journalism projects are engaging in climate action. 

Some good news, for a change, about climate change: When hundreds of newsrooms focus their attention on the climate crisis, all at the same time, the public conversation about the problem gets better: more prominent, more informative, more urgent.

In September, 323 news outlets from across the United States and around the world collaborated to provide a week of high-profile coverage of the climate story, in the most extensive such project on record. The collaboration was organized by Covering Climate Now, a project co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation.

Over the course of the week surrounding the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Sept. 23, Covering Climate Now outlets published or broadcast at least 3,640 stories about climate change. Social media sharing of Covering Climate Now stories was widespread, with 69,623 individual tweets and 1.93 billion total impressions.

“The goal is to make the climate story a routine part of daily news coverage, rather than a subject addressed only on special occasions.”

In September, “media attention to climate change and global warming was at its highest level globally in nearly a decade,” reported the Media and Climate Change Observatory program at the University of Colorado Boulder. The watchdog group Media Matters for America commented about Covering Climate Now, “This initiative was unique in the depth and scope of its coverage, and many of the participating outlets touched upon climate change issues that have been either underreported or ignored in the media altogether.”

Now, in addition to facilitating other joint coverage collaborations, Covering Climate Now aims to encourage better news coverage of the climate story by writing about that coverage and convening conferences where journalists can discuss and share best practices.

Read the full article about climate news coverage by Nina Sachdev at Media Impact Funders.