“Climate Is Every Story” Series Links Research and Reporting to Bolster Climate Journalism

This spring, members of the Schiller Institute’s Core faculty found themselves in an unfamiliar position: doing homework. In a media training seminar led by BC journalism professors Scott Helman and Janelle Nanos, environmental economist Edson Severnini filled in a worksheet, trying to condense a whole academic paper into an elevator pitch for the media. 

Severnini, Associate Professor of Economics and Institute Core faculty at BC, had researched a Brazilian law that exempts taxes on older cars, finding that the policy, though widely popular, leads to greater pollution as gas guzzlers are kept on the streets. He knew that his research might sound too foreign for an American audience and too technical for a non-academic one. He also knew that if he found a way to communicate his findings to journalists, they might find an important story to tell. 

On his worksheet, Severnini drafted a more relatable narrative through which to translate his findings: his dad griping about a steep car payment. “It was a research project that came out of my conversations with my dad, who was complaining about this tax,” Severnini said. “It gets people really pissed.” In the anecdote, Severnini’s dad’s feelings illustrated Brazilian popular opinion that tax cuts for older cars were good, a view that ignored the policy’s ill environmental side effects.

The same media training piloted by Severnini and the institute’s other Core faculty members is one arm of a year-long collaborative initiative launched this fall at BC called “Climate is Every Story,” which also includes a four-part event series and networking opportunities aimed at connecting faculty and students at BC with journalists to tell more impactful stories about the widening climate crisis. The program is co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute and the Journalism and Environmental Studies Programs at BC and is supported by a major grant from the Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA).

When she became the 2024-2026 journalism fellow at the ILA, she looked for ways to untether climate change from a narrow “climate” beat and more firmly embed it in all reporting. The interwoven dynamic of climate and journalism called for an interdisciplinary problem-solving approach, Nanos said, which prompted her to “find partnerships throughout the university to support the work of the journalism program.” That’s where the ILA came in. Its major grant funding for projects that nurture teams who are “thinking imaginatively about the liberal arts” seemed like a perfect way to address the issue.

Nanos worked with Helman to assemble a group of co-sponsors on the grant, including Schiller Institute director Laura Steinberg, Journalism Program director Angela Ards, Environmental Studies Program director Tara Pisani Gareau, and Core Fellow Courtney Humphries. They proposed an event series that would accomplish a threefold goal. The first was to connect academics to journalists, so that important climate research from BC professors could land in the news. The second was to train BC faculty to more effectively talk to the press about their climate findings. The third was to let BC journalism students cover the events for the series’ website, equipping the next generation of climate reporters with clips and professional journalism experience. “Ultimately,” Nanos said, “we saw that everybody would win out of this, and that was the goal.”

After joining the initial planning, the Schiller Institute contributed additional funds to support the project, and Steinberg assembled a working group of Schiller-affiliated faculty to help to shape the individual events, serve as panelists, and engage in media training. “Something that Schiller as an institute cares a lot about is public impact,” said Greg Adelsberger, the Institute’s director of finance and operations. “There's no better mechanism than getting in touch with journalists, because journalists are so good at getting stories out there.”

The event series kicked off on Oct. 1, when journalists Patrick McGroarty and Jason Beaubein convened with BC faculty members Summer Sherburne Hawkins and Praveen Kumar for a panel discussion on the public health impacts of climate change. The next events will cover the climate crisis as local news, climate’s effect on migration, and the business of climate—a range of topics chosen carefully to attract audiences from a range of disciplines. “We tried to reach a wide scope of students from different majors,” Nanos said. Each panel is followed by a lunch and networking session for journalism students and visiting panelists, providing students an opportunity to connect with BC alumni working in the industry. Some students also report on the events for the initiative’s microsite, helping them build their portfolio of clips. To Adelsberger, these opportunities are the perfect way to weave in student participation in a faculty-driven initiative. “BC is a great place to learn in an academic setting,” he said, “and we’re always excited when we can incorporate a real-world opportunity for students in our programs, to complement what they’re learning.”

Each event also includes a session in which visiting journalists sit down with members of the faculty working group to hear about their research—putting the professors’ media training to the test. At the first event, Nanos said, “when we had the media folks meet the faculty folks, it was like, ‘Okay, guys, you had your homework, now let’s see how you did.” Severnini got positive feedback on his narrative-led pitch, and Hawkins set up a meeting with a journalist at The Washington Post. “I was connected through the panel to a journalist I'm talking to next week, so it's exciting to feel like it's happening,” Hawkins said.

The program’s multipronged approach is designed to extend its reach beyond any one panel. For Severnini, the lessons taken from his “Climate is Every Story” media training are already ingrained in his research process. “Even when I'm writing the paper now, I try to be more mindful of, ‘Is the message clear?” Severini said. “If somebody who is not in academic circles reads at least the introduction and the conclusion, would they understand and be able to engage with the research?”