Silvia Giannelli (Italy), Ido Liven (Israel), Diego Arguedas Ortiz (Costa Rica), Imelda Abano (The Philippines), Lou Del Bello (Italy /UK), Justin Gerdes (USA), Anja Krieger (Germany), Stephen Leahy (Candada), Komila Nabiyeva (Germany), Fabiola Ortiz (Brazil), Mantoe Phakathi (Swaziland), Elena Roda (Italy), Anna Valmero (The Philippines)
“When media outlets in many countries cannot afford sending their correspondents to the event, or even perceive it as a distant happening with little relevance to domestic audiences, we saw the potential. The aggregation of local viewpoints helped making the coverage ‘glocal’, in the same way the climate crisis is at once global and local in both its causes and impacts.” Thats how “The Climate News Mosaic” explained its collaborative approach to reporting about UN Climate Change Conferences.
The project
The Climate News Mosaic is an independent, non-profit collective of environmental journalists from around the world with reporters based across five continents – from Canada to the Philippines and from Germany to Brazil – producing radio, video and textual stories in nearly ten different languages.
The idea was born prior to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP-19) in Warsaw in November 2013. The concept a collaborative approach: “Rather than covering the climate summit only from its venue, members of the group were offering local angles on the negotiations from their home countries. The aggregation of these local viewpoints helped making the coverage ‘glocal’, in the same way the climate crisis is at once global and local in both its causes and impacts.”
“By experimenting with a ‘glocal’ outlook we encouraged original reporting that reflects today’s interconnected and interdependent world and the truly global nature of the unfolding climate crisis.”
The collaboration
The blog they produced together was hosted on nine news websites. “Our 12 days long live blog offered a comprehensive coverage of the climate summit that could not have been otherwise captured in any single story. It featured dispatches from a public presentation on renewable energy strategy in Tel Aviv, from an interview with a senior meteorologist in Potsdam, from a press conference in Rio de Janeiro, from the rescue operations in typhoon hit towns in the Philippines and more.
Ultimately, the live blog served to complement, and feed, both the reporting each of the journalists in the group was doing individually and the coverage offered on the different media outlets that hosted it.” The group also published an And perhaps the e-book, featuring nearly 50 stories produced by CNM journalists and published in over 15 publications around the world.
Now the grou
p is preparing for the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in summer 2015 for an even upgraded project. We hope the #hostwriterPrize will help to realize this!
COP-19 coverage archive: https://climatemosaic.wordpress.com/portfolio/