The Brown Institute and the International Research Institute for Climate & Society co-sponsored today’s meeting “Climate, Data and Journalism: A discussion/workshop about the role of data in helping us to report better climate stories.”
While researchers produce a great deal of data about the existence and effects of climate change, very little of it is readily available to a non-specialist audience in a user-friendly platform. Journalists don’t have the time to sift through terabytes of data to find what’s most relevant for their needs; they often don’t have the expertise to translate that data into stories, and when they do tell stories about climate change, they struggle to make a complicated, networked problem fit into the arc of a traditional news story.
This Climate Week event, organized jointly by the International Research Institute for Climate & Society and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, will talk through challenges and opportunities associated with data-informed story telling — identifying promising sources of information, innovative visualization methods, and avenues for the climate and journalism communities to come together to use narrative to raise awareness of and access to climate information.
The workshop includes keynotes from the Chief Scientist of Climate Central, Heidi Cullen (pictured above), the IRI’s Walter Baethgen (pictured below), and Andrew Revkin from The New York Times. These talks are followed by a panel of journalists from The New York Times, Bloomberg and other outlets. Read more about the event here http://brwn.co/cdj.
