Transforming Newsrooms With Katherine Dunn
This episode features a conversation with Katherine Dunn, Content Editor at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, a program led by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute. It was recorded in March 2024.
Through her work at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (or OCJN) Katherine has worked with more than 500 journalists from over 100 countries, seeking to improve climate literacy and climate storytelling. In 2023, she was a co-author of the European Broadcasting Union’s, “Climate Journalism That Works”, a report on how newsrooms can better cover climate change and build a climate strategy. I actually discussed this amazing resource in a previous episode, with Alexandra Borchardt, so, though Katherine and I didn’t talk about it here, if you’re interested, you can find a link to that episode below.
Before joining the Reuters Institute, Katherine spent the best part of a decade working as a reporter and editor in business journalism, with a focus on the energy and commodities markets and industries. This included a stint as editor at Fortune magazine, where she covered climate change and the energy transition.
Amongst other things, Katherine and I discussed what makes an effective climate news story, the obligations of newsrooms when it comes to addressing climate issues, and the unique role of meteorologists in delivering relevant and actionable local climate insights.
Additional links:
About the Oxford Climate Journalism Network
Climate news insights from The Reuters Institute
Insights on news avoidance from The Digital News Report
“Find your mango” and other learnings from the OCJN
The BBC’s “Life at 50C” series
The New Yorker’s stories about electricians
My interview with Alexandra Borchardt about the “Climate Journalism That Works” report.
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you and me improve our abilities to engage, empower, and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Katherine Dunn, Content Editor at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, a programme led by the University of Oxford's Reuters Institute. It was recorded in March 2024.
Through her work at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, or OCJN, Katherine has worked with more than 500 journalists from over 100 countries seeking to improve climate literacy and climate storytelling.
In 2023, she was a co-author of the European Broadcasting Union's “Climate Journalism That Works”, a report on how newsrooms can better cover climate change and build a climate strategy.
I actually discussed this amazing resource in a previous episode, with Alexandra Borchardt, so though Katherine and I didn't talk about it here, if you're interested, you can find a link to that episode in the show notes.
Before joining the Reuters Institute, Katherine spent the best part of a decade working as a reporter and editor in business journalism, with a focus on the energy and commodities markets and industries. This included a stint as editor at Fortune Magazine, where she covered climate change and the energy transition.
Amongst other things, Katherine and I discussed what makes an effective climate news story, the obligations of newsrooms when it comes to addressing climate issues, and the unique role of meteorologists in delivering relevant and actionable local climate insights. So, let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Katherine Dunn.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Katherine: It's such a big question, right? Because if people don't know what's happening, how can they act? It's a complicated question too, because I think for a long time, journalism, and probably science communication, has been based on the idea that once you tell people things they will then act. And it's really not as direct a relationship as that as we've sort of painstakingly realised through the work of a lot of people who have done kind of behavioural psychology and communications. That sort of underlying assumption isn't really as simple as we’d like to think. But in general, if people don't have information, they can't act, they can't make choices, they can't understand the choices politicians are making for them, they can't choose what to eat or what to buy. It's the same as, really, for any question in our society. Why do we need to have the good information we have? And why do we need to have information that is first and foremost about serving the audience with facts, not with ideology?
From the Reuters Institute’s research, which I'll kind of refer back to a lot, which is not done by me, but it's done by my colleagues Dr Waqas Ejaz, and also quite a lot by Doctor Craig Robertson and Doctor Richard Fletcher, that you know there is a relationship between how often people read about climate change, what they watch climate change news, and how much they care and how interested they are.
So we do see a connection, but whether or not that translates into action is sort of a bigger existential question that I think we're all grappling with. But this is overturning people's lives, right? Climate change is affecting people's lives, and it's affecting people's lives in lots of interconnected ways that are sometimes not called climate change. And they are owed that information, you know, as journalists and especially if you're a public broadcaster, the core of why you exist is to provide your audiences with information about why food is more expensive, why the energy system is changing, why the seasons are unreliable, why there's drought, why we're having issues with water, all of this kind of stuff. So yeah, I think they deserve that information.
Dickon: Very interesting perspective. I like thinking about it as an obligation.
Katherine: That's not a perspective that every single outlet will have. It's so tempting to talk about news media like a monolith. That obligation to the audiences in a sort of “public interest” way is not at the core of what all media does. But the idea that you provide usable, factually based, credible information is at the core of, at least, sort of what journalists subscribe to.
For public broadcasters, that is literally enshrined in in why they exist. And so sometimes there's a lot of resistance to covering climate change, not really for conspiratorial reasons, as sometimes people tell me in the dog park. Really it’s because of reasons I'm sure we're going to get into and it frustrates me because I think we owe our audience this information about why their lives are changing. What are we going to do? Not look and not cover what's in front of our eyes? Right? News organisations sometimes forget we have an obligation to cover war and conflict, we have an obligation to cover health crises, and yes, we have an obligation to cover climate change and to figure out a way to do that effectively.
Dickon: What can you tell listeners about the Oxford Climate Journalism network? Why was it created? Who is it for? And what does it hope to achieve?
Katherine: It was the project of one of our visiting fellows, Wolfgang Blau, and our previous deputy Director, Meera Selva, who's now at Internews, and the idea was to build this network where climate would kind of go under everything the Reuters Institute does. So, we do fellowships, we do research, we do leadership training and support for people in news organisations, and then we bring 100 journalists, virtually, every six months, it's not a course, but it is sort of this interdisciplinary learning experience of climate change, where we look at it from every different angle. You know, we're going to do litigation and misinformation. We're going to do biodiversity. We're going to do droughts, yada yada yada. And at the core of this idea was always the idea that climate change is interdisciplinary. And that in your news organisation, people in all different positions, on all different beats and all different roles should feel confident understanding how climate change is affecting their job is affecting what they're covering and able to make those connections and able to integrate that.
The idea that your politics reporter should be able to ask a climate question to scrum and your business reporter should understand the insurance implications of climate risk or how it's reshaping the EV industry. You know, whatever, people take from it, kind of what they need and what they want. We're now two and a half years in, so we've had 500 journalists, more or less come, through the OCJN. And it's super international, I think we're at more than 100 countries, maybe more like 120. We do it in English, but you know, obviously all these different languages are represented and it's kind of two thirds so-called Global South. Even though we are here in Oxford, it really tries to not feel that it's focused on what's going on here in the UK and really be international.
And you know, we've had people from the programme, they've started climate desks, they've gone on to new climate roles in their organisation, they've done all kinds of interesting things, actually. They've done big international collaborations. A lot of them have also done their first climate story.
Dickon: So, I want to start with some discussion of journalistic objectivity. I feel like this is a pretty big one right now. What are the traditions surrounding this idea, and where do they come into conflict with contemporary ideas about climate journalism?
Katherine: Like I said earlier, we tend to think about journalism as a monolith and although across different countries, journalism has a huge amount in common, the culture around objectivity really varies. Being Canadian, I was sort of trained in, for lack of a better word, a really American objectivity tradition. When I came to the UK and I realised that different newspapers would have quite a different perspective, I was sort of struck. This really goes against my training.
So, I think it's important to say with anything about objectivity in journalism is that a lot of it comes down to the news culture in that country and is about the news culture, particularly in that outlet.
You have very clear political leanings for a lot of journalism in the UK, but then you also have the BBC, which you know has incredibly strict guidelines nn how they can cover news.
It is an interesting dynamic because there's been a perception, I'm speaking totally anecdotally right now, I don't have numbers for this, but I can see that there has been a powerful perception that wanting to cover climate change is in some ways an activist role. I think that's ridiculous for the reasons we talked about. Because climate change is so fundamentally changing people's lives, the idea that we wouldn't cover it, I think, makes no sense. But for a long time, there's been a real resistance at a lot of news organisations, and the people who have really sought that out have often been charged as being activists.
There's an element to climate coverage too that you are facing these questions in a really deep and personal way, right? Because the more you know about climate change, the more you think, “How do I do my part to stop this?” And as a journalist, to really step back and say, “I'm not going to be an activist as I understand it,” you really have to trust to that other people are out there in their own lanes, doing their thing. And you can be a journalist going into situations saying what you see. You trust that there are activists and they're doing their job and your job is to cover them.
What you can't get away from is the facts lead us to understand that climate change is an existential crisis for us. That's not an individual's opinion. That's not an individual's feelings or personal beliefs. That's an objective fact. And news organisations have to create the space for people to do their job and for them to be able report with the urgency and the intensity that the crisis demands.
Of course that’s different than going in and maybe wanting a renewable project to be more sustainable than it is. Maybe wanting an activist to be better organised or to be more professional than they are. Maybe wanting the story to tell something that it doesn't. There are news outlets out there that see their role explicitly as spurring climate action, and I think when we talk about climate communications, this becomes a really complicated topic because it is this question of what if we have journalistic conventions that aren't only not promoting climate action but are undermining climate action? It puts us in a really interesting position about how we should think about our own work.
It's been striking to me that the scientists are having this discussion too, right? We feel like we're on one side just like, “Where are we? Who are we? What's the line?” And the scientists are doing that too. They're thinking, “If we just go out and we present information to people and we think they're gonna run with it and they're gonna know what to do with that and we just stop there. Or should we go further? Or should we change how we communicate? What is the line for us?” So, it's something that's really happening in parallel.
That's a conversation news outlets actually need to be having and they need to be having it not from a place of, “we are going to get politicised, we are going to get charged, people are going to come after us,” they need to be having that conversation of where do we personally put the line. And how are we going to back our journalists when they are? Because they will be. And how are we going to tell this story? What's the tone we're going to take?
Dickon: What does “effective” climate journalism mean in the first place?
Katherine: This is also a really good question and you could drown in caveats here. Is effective journalism journalism that gets clicked on? Journalism that gets read that gets consumed? Is it journalism that spurs action? Is it journalism that ends climate change, right? Is anything short of stopping climate change a failure? And people are really, really paralysed by this by letting kind of the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But if you go back to that public interest sort of mandate. Where our job is to provide good, reliable, accurate information that people will actually read, engage and consume, and it'll help them make decisions about their lives. What's key to effective journalism is that people read it and that people listen to it and that people watch it.
You do want climate journalism that connects and you do want climate journalism that does not speak down to the audience, that helps audience make choices about their lives, that helps the audience understand what's going on in the world around them.
And I think for me, going back to that interdisciplinary focus, I mean, I'm a business journalist by training and profession and as a business journalist, I think this is very core, I really believe in it, that you should be able to understand the economy and the impact of climate on the economy too. Right?
To me, effective climate journalism is journalism that has that interdisciplinary focus. The question again of does it spur political action? Do people vote differently because of it? That’s sort of a thorny one, and one you have to go back to where you see your role in society. It should at least give you the information to make choices about your own life.
Dickon: Globally, how much are people consuming climate news? And how does consumption of this news inform their perceptions of climate change and its effects?
Katherine: So, this is a good one because we actually have a lot of research on this from the digital news report that comes out every year and we have it also from my colleague Dr Waqas Ejaz, who does a yearly report on eight countries looking at audiences around the world. The digital news report is across 46 countries. It's a little bit different. It doesn't ask the same questions.
People are consuming climate change news. That’s climate change news that they identify as climate change news, right? Because a lot of stories, maybe they're but food, they're about energy, they're about migration. They're not necessarily saying they're about climate change.
And also we're seeing that those weekly climate change news users, they're a little bit more interested in all kinds of climate change coverage compared with those using climate change news less. And there's not a big difference between younger and older respondents and between those of different political affiliations.
When people read this climate news, they do think it’s significant. Nearly 2/3 of respondents believe that news media play a significant role in influencing climate change decisions. People are consuming climate change news, and there is a clear link between how significant they think it is.
People who consume it more often, they also tend to think that climate change is affecting people right now, and that it's tending to affect their health. So, they feel that it's more immediate.
Dickon: Do we know what, if anything, stops people reading climate news?
Katherine: One of the things I'll say that is really striking to me because it feels like such a big difference between some of the accepted wisdom and something we hear all the time and what the data says.
We hear, anecdotally from editors, all the time, that people do not want to read about climate change and that avoidance of climate change is higher than other topics. And that, yeah, people aren't interested.
The data doesn't quite bear that out, as far as we can see. The picture is not great, the fact is that news avoidance in general is quite high, I think in 2023 the number was close to all-time highs at 36% across forty six markets, so it's 36% of people that are avoiding news all or some of the time.
But the data kind of showed that when people are avoiding news, they generally tend to avoid all news. It's not really that selective. It's not a great picture. A lot of people are avoiding the news. But they don't really seem to be avoiding climate change news substantially more than they're avoiding other kinds of news.
They have some figures on why: You hear things like untrustworthy, especially in places that are quite politically divided. There's nothing new related to climate change news that it’s repetitive. It basically negatively effects our mood. It's depressing. They feel worn out by the amount. And that, you know, there's nothing they can do, so a lack of agency, stuff that you kind of see for a lot of other topics in terms of news avoidance.
But what we hear from editors, other than this perception that people really don't want to read climate news, is this feeling of it being repetitive. This feeling that I know we're screwed, so tell me something I don't know. And honestly, I get it. I mean, who among us hasn't read the headline of a piece about an IPCC report and thought, “Dear God, I've got the idea.”
People do also tell us that can be technical, that it can be full of jargon, and also in quite a lot of countries too, there isn't a word for climate change in a local dialect or a local language. It's not that people don't know climate change exists like they can see exactly what is happening. They're not using this jargon, or it can be perceived as something very Western and very elitist. The ideology of climate change is like being imposed on people.
These are kind of all the things we're up against. As with climate change journalism, it's like, so easy to talk about the challenges. And it's so much harder to talk about the, I think solutions is too simplistic a word actually, but some of the strategies for getting around that.
We are in the stage now, I think, where we're really talking about like what are the strategies and we are seeing news organisations actually experiment with those. And interestingly, we had the memorial lecture a couple weeks ago here, and the speaker was the publisher for the New York Times, and my boss Rasmus Nielsen asked him about this conundrum with climate change news. And he said that one of the things they struggled with was the fact that there was this sort of perception that climate news was repetitive and that people weren't engaging with it even when it was really, really amazing work.
And one of the things they did is they put a visual editor in charge and tried to think about like, how could they make climate stories look different than what people have seen before? To kind of jar people out of this feeling of, “I know exactly what I'm going to get here and I know exactly what the story's going to look like.”
Dickon: Why should we all be trying to find our mangoes?
Katherine: Yeah, so this is something that came out of a discussion we had in the OCJN. An Egyptian editor we had in the first cohort, the very first cohort, she talked about mangos and how in Egypt everybody loves mangoes. Actually, that's the case in a lot of countries in the OCJN, people of mangos. Why are the mangoes less tasty this year? Why aren't they as good? We had this interesting discussion like, what's the mango in your country?
I'm Canadian. I grew up next to the mountains, it’s skiing. My colleague Diego, he's Costa Rican, it's coffee. It's a cultural passion. It's a sport. It's a food. But it really goes back to this idea of connecting climate change to things that people already care about, using that as the way in to talk about climate change. Part of that is also having respect for your audience, right? And having respect for the things that matter to them and the things that make their lives valuable and worth living. It's different stuff all over the world, but it's food, it's sports and it's it's culture and it's heritage, right?
We see that happening kind of all over the world. We see people making these connections and a lot of climate change reporting puts in numbers and puts in financial terms, the losses of climate change, and there's also this question here of how can you convey the thread or the loss to a heritage site or, yeah, to a beloved food? To a dish you can never eat anymore. You know, we had a member in Fiji who's writing stories about these little kind of mini islands where people used to go and picnic with their families every summer. They would celebrate holidays there. Whole family would go and they don't exist anymore.
Dickon: What role do meteorologists play in all of this? How can they harness their roles as messengers about the weather to connect the dots for audiences when it comes to climate change?
Katherine: I think meteorologists have a very important role to play. I remember we spoke to The Weather Channel in the US when I worked on the EB report. And it was very interesting because they talked about how they have a very politically mixed audience, which now in the world of news media, especially in a polarised country like the US, it's not very common anymore.
You also have somebody who audiences are used to seeing everyday, or however often they they watch the news, they kind of have a trusting relationship with that person, often. And that person, not always, but usually, they have kind of scientific background.
So they’re somebody who straddles that role of climate scientists and journalists. And I think the trust there can be very helpful because this is somebody who you trust to give you tangible, everyday usable knowledge, right? Their information is local, it's it's useful, and I think they have a lot of experience, often, putting quite complex ideas into very down to Earth kind of way. They're not talking down to their audience.
We've had quite a lot of meteorologists in the OCJN and we always encourage them to apply. And we also ask them for their advice on things like extreme weather attribution, which we've seen entering newsrooms more and more, and more often, the first people to use that and to integrate that into their work of the meteorologists. And we've asked them, how do you phrase and how do you contextualise for the audience the link between climate change and the weather they're seeing today, for example, a drought. And how do you contextualise the more difficult to understand elements? You know, it's very, very cold. We're in a freak cold snap. Is climate change still happening? They're often the first people to deal with, and to contextualise that.
So I mean, I think they're really important and I think if you're lucky enough to have these people in your newsroom, you should really be using them. They know how to communicate this stuff. They're very valuable. They've been doing it for a long time, and they should be kind of at the centre of your your climate coverage, actually.
Dickon: One of the lessons that you highlighted that emerged from the OCJN sessions was the importance of focusing on people doing things. Why is this important?
Katherine: This comes out of a session that we do in climate and psychology with Doctor Kris De Meyer, who's at the UCL Climate Action Unit. He's a neuroscientist. Anybody hasn't looked him up before, he's a great speaker. He's really interesting. He really comes in as look, “The only way people change is they see other people changing and then they stick with that change, when they've already started, and they have to justify it.” And if you've been interested in climate communications for a long time, this won't surprise you. But the first time he did the session for us, I was like, “Oh my god. Telling people things are very bad and about to get worse does not change people's behaviour. It shouldn't be that revelatory, because actually, we know from a lot of health interventions that telling people they need to lose weight doesn't make people lose weight. Telling people they shouldn't drink doesn't make people stop drinking like. Lots of things where you shame and guilt people and it's not really that simple. None of this stuff works. So why do we think it would with climate change?
When he said that that idea of “people doing something, because” from a storytelling perspective, that really made sense to me, at least, because my first journalism teacher was a guy called Dave Tate, who's an icon of Canadian journalism. And he taught, you know, kind of a generation of Canadian journalists. You get him your little 17 or 18 year olds and you get in there and you're writing your first story and he has you right across the top of the paper. A story is someone doing something because. And so for me, this idea really clicked, sometimes the challenge too with trying to find good stories about climate change, I've been there myself, as you're writing story after story and it's grim, and your editor says, “Have you got anything not depressing for me?” which can set up a dynamic very quickly where you're looking for a silver bullet. You're looking for something to offer if you're not careful, it can set you up to spread greenwashing, shall we say, just because the temptation for there to be a positive story is very strong.
But when you think of it as people doing things, it's not your job to say whether or not they succeeded, or whether they will succeed, or whether you think they should succeed. It's your job to report on people doing something because. They believe in it. That's the core of the story. And if you think of it that way, you can really, I think, tell stories that put humans and agency at the heart of a lot of stories. They're engaging to read. They're interesting to read, but they also kind of play to this, what we know about climate and psychology: Hitting people over the head with loads and loads of scary stuff just makes people shut down. And the reality in this news economy is when people shut down, that means they do not click or read your stories and that means it's hard to justify writing more of it.
So, I think that's been something that I’ve really kept an eye on. What kinds of stories make me want to send them to my brother and sister? I don't want to put them on Twitter so everybody knows what a good person I am and how much you care about climate change. The really scary stuff we really want to share it. But the kind of stuff that I want to send to my brother and sister, who care about this, are interested, but are not in this world.
I've been watching it as a couple years old now, but I've been watching it recently, which is the life at 50C series from the BBC. It's all about extreme heat. It takes place all over the world. They've got these guys in a small village in Nigeria and they're building a well and they have their own cameras, but they're digging a well and you're like on the edge of your seat because the days are going by and they're not finding water. Or you're going to an area of Iraq where a guy's looking at his farmland. Will the crop fail that year? These tangible, fundamental stories we have that we tell in our society, in all kinds of different ways: Will the crop fail? Will they find water? Will they succeed? There's New Yorker story about people becoming electricians, which sounds really unsexy and uninteresting, but it's people like, yeah, I'm going to change my whole career. I'm going to change my whole life. I've got this information. I'm going to do something with it. So all kinds of climate stories that I feel like you're really on a journey with someone importantly. I don't think it's a new idea. It's really about valuing how we tell a story and thinking proactively about how we tell a story rather than necessarily falling back on some of the formulas we're trained to use.
Dickon: What’s the single-most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communications endeavours.
Katherine: I would kind of repeat myself because I would say someone doing something because. Are you telling a story that people would sit down and read?
Dickon: What’s the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues.
Katherine: Shame and guilt. Guys, it doesn't work, so there's no point, especially shaming and guilting regular everyday people rather than governments or businesses. Telling people that they are screwing up and it's their fault and they're terrible. It's just not working. We've been trying for a long time and we know full well it just does not work and it makes people feel like crap.
Dickon: I had a great time talking to Katherine for this episode. But what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, it's this wonderful shorthand that a story is “someone doing something, because.” It really hit home. Across all the interviews I've recorded for this podcast - a bunch of great, effective mnemonics and snackable strategies have reared their heads, and this is another good one. Not all stories are made equal, right? There are good stories, bad stories, boring stories, confusing stories, unrelatable stories, all kinds of stories. But this simple guidance, “someone doing something, because,” is a great framework to ensure that some of the most compelling narrative attributes are in place.
Beyond that, of course, are those mangoes - the tangible, impacted beloved things that raise the salience of climate change for each of us, wherever or whoever we might be. What are your mangoes? Or if you're working on a campaign or a story, or some other output right now? What are your audience's mangoes? I think that's a vital question to be asking as we seek to better engage the people we're trying to reach.
So that's what I'll be taking with. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Katherine Dunn for sharing her time and insight with the show. It was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes. Thanks also to you for listening to Communicating Climate Change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find communicating climate change on LinkedIn too, and if you think the series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction.
Remember, each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits to help us develop the strategies and the frameworks that we'll need for this complex task. So be sure to stay tuned for more. For anything else, just head over to communicatingclimatechange.com until next time. Take care.
