Backchat: Covering Climate Now
Nature Podcast
podcast@nature.com
4.5 • 893 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode:
00:44 A global media collaboration
This week, Nature is taking part in the Covering Climate Now project. What is it, and why has Nature joined? Editorial: Act now and avert a climate crisis
05:49 ‘Climate change’ vs ‘climate emergency’
In early 2019, The Guardian changed the wording they use when covering climate stories. Our panel discusses the importance of phrasing, and how it evolves. The Guardian: Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment
13:40 Choosing climate images
What makes a good image for a climate change story? What do they add to a written news story?
This episode of the Backchat is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 media outlets to highlight the issue of climate change.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to our roundtable discussion show, Backchat, where we look at the stories behind the stories here at nature. |
| 0:07.5 | On this edition of the show, we'll be talking climate change, discussing a worldwide joint publishing project, the importance of language and how we can use images to tell a story. |
| 0:18.6 | I'm Benjamin Thompson, and joining me in the studio are Helen Pearson. |
| 0:22.3 | Hi, I'm Helen Pearson. I'm Chief Magazine Editor for Nature. |
| 0:25.7 | Lizzie Brown. Hi, I'm Lizzie Brown. I'm the managing media editor for nature. And Esan Masood. |
| 0:31.0 | Hi, I'm Esan Massoud and I look after editorials, Africa and the Middle East. |
| 0:35.5 | Coming up in the show, we'll be chatting about the evolving |
| 0:38.0 | use of words used when reporting climate stories. How might language affect people's views on the |
| 0:43.7 | subject? Firstly, though, this week nature is taking part in a project called covering climate |
| 0:49.1 | now. Helen, as Nature's chief magazine editor, you've been leading on nature's involvement. |
| 0:55.0 | What can you tell me about covering climate now and what it hopes to achieve? |
| 0:59.2 | Yeah, so covering climate now is a really interesting project, which is a group of many media outlets from around the world all collaborating together and committing to have one week of intensive coverage of climate change |
| 1:12.2 | in the week leading up to the UN Climate Summit in New York on September the 23rd. |
| 1:17.3 | If that's what the project is, how did nature get involved in the first instance? |
| 1:22.0 | Our involvement really started back in early June when I got an email from an environmental |
| 1:26.5 | journalist called Mark Hertzgard, |
| 1:29.0 | who's written for a long time about climate change telling us about the project, I thought it was |
| 1:33.1 | intriguing. I took it to the nature team and said, do we want to be part of this effort? And there was |
| 1:37.8 | really universal enthusiasm from the editors to be part of this. When we signed up, which I think was in August, there were about |
| 1:45.9 | 60 media outlets around the world taking part. Now there are over 220 with a combined |
| 1:51.3 | audience of over one billion in total. So it's just a very unusual and ambitious effort to |
| 1:57.1 | raise the volume of news and the quality as well around climate change. |
... |
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