Six newsrooms in Florida join forces to cover climate change
Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab,When you live in a state where hurricane season has had devastating effects for your audience, climate coverage becomes a central topic that your newsroom has to cover in a thoughtful way. Now, six Florida news organizations have announced they are partnering to pool resources and cover climate change in a comprehensive way.
The Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, WLRN, Palm Beach Post and Orlando Sentinel built a shared Slack channel to communicate about coverage and have started sharing their stories on the topic across their newsrooms. They also have regular calls to give each other updates in coverage and eventually would like to collaborate in reporting, leveraging each newsroom’s resources. Mark Katches, executive editor of the Tampa Bay Times, explained the partnership as beneficial for the audience and news organizations.
“A decade ago, a partnership like this would have seemed improbable. Newsrooms saw each other as rivals. We still compete – often fiercely. But a new pragmatism has taken hold in newsrooms across the country. We simply can’t cover the same ground that we once could. And truth be told, we’re not vying for the same readers.”