by Steve MacLaughlin and Ariel Rodriguez
Ariel and I met in Dallas, Texas, in the early 2000s, when I was forecasting and broadcasting the weather at NBC-owned KXAS and he was forecasting at Telemundo 39.
We were both clearly seeing with our own eyes –and increasing alarm — how the climate was changing. However, we were finding it difficult to actually talk about it on TV.
Covering climate change at that time was discouraged, perhaps due to fear of viewer blowback. And it was not just us. Even meteorologists in more progressive parts of the country were running into the same roadblocks.
What a difference a few years make.
Fast-forward to 2023 at NBC/Telemundo Miami, where climate change reporting is not just encouraged, but required for both Ariel and me.
Our duopoly (NBC6 and Telemundo 51) had been inconsistently producing climate change content for about ten years. In fact, when I was hired in 2017, it was specifically as a meteorologist and climate change reporter, something the station had never really had in the past.
While my colleague Angie Lassman and I were producing reports on the NBC side, Ariel was doing the same for Telemundo. While we now were able to highlight climate change in our reporting, we still faced two daunting challenges: insufficient resources and coverage that was problem-based.
Resources were limited. It was a daily struggle to get a photographer or editor to shoot a story or even just to get time from a producer to get these stories on the air. With all our daily pressing demands, climate coverage kept being relegated to the bottom in the list of priorities.
The other factor, and as it turned out perhaps the more significant one, was that most of our reports were “problem-based.” We were getting very good at identifying and describing the problems that arise from climate change, even though over the years we had learned that while viewers absolutely want climate change content, they are hungry for “solutions” beyond just the presentation of the problems.
There was an urgent need to rethink the way we conceptualized and executed our stories.
Enter the Solutions Journalism Network and specifically the Climate Beacon Newsrooms Initiative. Ariel began working on this project in 2022 and the NBC6 and Telemundo 51 newsrooms began officially participating at the start of 2023. Our managers asked meteorologists, reporters, photographers, editors and producers with climate change experience from both stations to take part.
Ariel and I were given two objectives: the first, to transform our newsroom into an aggressive, daily climate change content machine, and the second, to ensure that this transformation was to solutions-based journalism. Most crucially, we were promised resources to achieve these goals.
We decided to go big.
We each produced a long-form documentary. Mine was on “managed retreat” and Ariel’s was on plastics. These documentaries, along with additional reports from our other colleagues, not only led to the creation of a solutions-based climate change franchise, but they were also instrumental in changing the philosophy of the newsroom.
A year after starting this project, we have learned valuable lessons and seen significantly positive results, both in our newsroom dynamics and in the orientation of our coverage:
The culture change is remarkable.
Everyone is invested and collaborating. We now have every member of the newsroom from reporters & meteorologists to producers to the assignment desk keeping an eye out for content every day. Producers who initially were reluctant to give us the necessary air-time are now totally on board with climate coverage. Even one prominent anchor who was a skeptic seven years ago has become a convert and asks amazing questions on and off air.
Additionally, this new dynamic is a two-way street, with meteorologists being able to ask for resources and time to cover climate change stories but also producers pitching climate change content to the meteorologists. engagement from both sides of the duopoly newsroom.
We now have daily discussions in newsroom meetings about how to cover climate change and an aggressive approach by producers to find climate change content and get it on the air through meteorologists and reporters.
The Climate Beacon Newsroom project is a duopoly project, meaning that both the English-speaking NBC6 and the Spanish-speaking Telemundo 51 staff took part. Some reports were completely in English and some completely in Spanish. Ariel, being bilingual, produced his stories in both languages. But the content that was shot in either language is available to both NBC6 and Telemundo 51, so that content may become either Spanish or English or both in the future as we repurpose anything that has already been produced.
The collaboration also reaches across platforms. Everything we do on the TV side also lives on digital forever.
We are doing more while at the same time learning a lot about efficiency. For example, it is a challenge taking a 22-minute documentary and splitting it up into five stand-alone stories for the news. But once we pulled this off, we now had five weeks of powerful content; a story a week for five weeks.
We have increased coverage of solutions-based climate and environmental stories. Our solutions-based coverage went from zero to probably once a month, and our climate change coverage in general, even if not always solutions-based, went from once every couple of weeks to weekly and sometimes daily.
Here in Miami, for a meteorologist, six months of the year are quiet and six months can be overwhelming because of rainy and hurricane seasons. During the quiet time, producing long-form stories or even shorter packages is much easier because we have the time to go out and shoot. But during hurricane season, going out and shooting stories is impossible, so we find creative ways to weave climate change content into the daily coverage, like simple graphics or a short script to read. When time is tight, we adjust to how we are getting content on the air, but just because it is hurricane season, it doesn’t mean our climate coverage goes away.
This new spirit of collaboration extends beyond the walls of the newsroom. We have expanded involvement with local universities, community leaders and non-profit. These alliances contribute to a better engagement with our audiences.
The world is ready to accept climate change coverage. News outlets today see its value not just from a journalistic standpoint, but from a business standpoint. But climate change coverage only works if it never takes a break. It requires producers, reporters, videographers and photographers that are aggressive and committed every single day. Viewers trust us. We have the opportunity, and the essential responsibility to the public, to talk about climate change in every single weathercast. And we must always keep in mind the crucial caveat: identifying the problem loses all its power if it isn’t tied to a solution. Our newsroom understood this fundamental shift and now think about solutions-based journalism every day.
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