Glocal transparent reporting on climate change with Live Blog
Frustrated by the lack of interest in climate coverage by mainstream media, 15 young journalists across 5 continents decided 2 years ago to get together and bring a new collaborative approach to environmental journalism. They wanted to be globally connected, but locally rooted: reporting about policymaking and relating it with what climate change means to the people, the environment and the economies around the world. In October 2013, thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, Climate News Mosaic was born.
Climate News Mosaic piloted their idea of ‘glocal’ reporting from the 19th United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Warsaw, Poland in November 2013. Sourcefabric is and has always been interested in supporting quality journalism. Then, we supported the project providing access to Live Blog 2.0. Thanks to Live Blog, the team was able to cover the topics which were discussed at the Summit in real time while simultaneously putting them into wider perspective with reporting from their local realities. They were able to provide different angles by including materials and comments from colleagues who were participating remotely from the countries affected by climate changes. Right before the end of 2014, the project won the #hostwriter prize acknowledging their reporting efforts.
With the upcoming 21st UN Climate Change Conference taking place from 30 November to 11 December in Paris, France, we can again provide our support to an organisation whose mission is in line with ours. Climate News Mosaic will be reporting using our newest Live Blog 3.0 version, which provides the editorial team with quite a few additional features. Most notable are an improved clean and fun to use interface, the option for multi-item posts and a simpler embed from any URL.
The team will set up separate live blogs to cover the entirety of the 12-day Summit. In order to make it as easy as possible for their media partners to reuse the liveblogs, they will make use of the great Iframe Scaffolder, a small tool that allows them to combine various embeds to just one “Omniembed”. Based on that solution their media partners will only need to embed one little code snippet and all related live blogs for all days of the Summit coverage will be available.
With regards to changes introduced this year, Elena Roda, one of the team members, has commented: “What will change will be the Live Blog platform, its better performance, and our awareness of the work we did previously. In 2013, it was an experiment for us, now we know that people are interested in the project and the group is able to do a job unlike any other medium. The ‘glocal’ aspect is the main feature of the Climate News Mosaic and we will focus on it this year.”
As George Monbiot noted in his Guardian’s opinion piece about the recent tragic situation in Indonesia: “At the climate summit in Paris in December the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere.” We believe Climate News Mosaic will be able to prove again that it is possible to report on the climate issues without failing to provide context to such reporting. A true mosaic of points of view.
The 'mosaic' will be delivered by part of the team reporting directly from the Paris conference:
Imelda Visaya-Abano, an award-winning environmental journalist and media trainer from the Philippines, will lead the Climate News Mosaic live blog. She is the Founder and President of the Philippine Network of Environmental Journalists (PNEJ) and a former Board of Directors of the US-based Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). She works as an Editor of the Philippine Environmental News, a premier news provider of environment, climate change, disasters, sustainability, energy, waste, water, and green living issues in the Philippines.
Diego Arguedas Ortiz is a Costa Rican journalist covering climate change, energy and sustainable development. He covered the 2013 Climate Talks (COP19 in Warsaw) with Climate News Mosaic and tracked the 2014 and 2015 climate conferences (in Lima and Paris) with the Adopt a Negotiator team. He rans Ojo al Clima, the first climate change only section in a mainstream Latin American media outlet. Based in San José, Costa Rica, he writes for InterPress Service and SciDev.net.
Lou Del Bello is a multimedia science journalist who specialises in climate change and international development. She has worked as an environmental reporter for ten years, first running her own online magazine with a team of local journalists, and since 2012 from the UK, where she moved to pursue a master in science journalism. She now works as a reporter and multimedia producer for SciDev.Net, where she contributes to the coverage of the UN climate talks from the field since COP19 in Warsaw.
There will also be three people participating in the live blog remotely from Italy, Canada, and Germany. The outreach of the project is ensured by the media partners hosting the Climate News Mosaic blog. Confirmed so far are DeSmog, IPS, Philippine EnviroNews, and Philippine Network of Environmental Journalists, but Climate News Mosaic is open for more!
You can follow the coverage here. All the content from the live blog may be reused under a CC Attribution License. If you want, you can also embed the content on your website by contacting [email protected].
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