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I’m featured on “Meet a Tar Heel”
I grew up just a few miles away from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I figured I’d go somewhere far away for college, so when I was young, I paid little attention to UNC. Then, when I was in high school, my family and I moved to Yankeeland, the outskirts of Boston, where the winters were cold, dark and relentless. In my first week of at my new school school, a couple of my classmates asked me if I’d been “allowed” to learn about the Civil War at my high school in North Carolina. Had I been taught to call it “The War of Northern Aggression”?*
All of this is a long way of saying that I did go to UNC, and I loved it, enough to return for a master’s degree in journalism. And now I’m profiled on the university’s website. Read it.
*The answer is no, we called it the Civil War. In fact, the month I left North Carolina, my history class had been reading Howard Zinn.
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Wherein my head swells a bit
Environmentalists argue that removing Appalachian mountaintops to mine coal is a disaster. For many who live in that hardscrabble area, it seems an economic necessity. Sara Peach and her student team from the University of North Carolina captured that basic division, and its many nuances, in a well-constructed series of interviews and images presented in a style that’s dispassionate and non-judgmental and, largely because of that, makes clear how wrenching this issue is.
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Rutgers climatologist Tony Broccoli on communicating climate science
I had the chance to interview climate scientist Tony Broccoli at a workshop for meteorologists and climatologists last May. He provided important insights for both scientists and journalists on how to engage lay audiences in this complex, politicized topic. Watch the video, then click over to the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media for more of the interview.
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Quick hit: mountaintop removal story airs on LinkTV’s “Earth Focus”
A story I produced with Chris Carmichael on mountaintop removal appears in the most recent episode of LinkTV’s “Earth Focus.”
Our segment starts at the 5:20 mark.
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Challenges as digital journalists take on climate change
I just had a new article published at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media on how the best digital storytellers are covering climate change online. Here’s a taste.
Powering A Nation takes gold: Interview with The Visual Student
After www.poweringanation.org won gold at the 64th College Photographer of the Year contest, The Visual Student interviewed me and my colleague Ashley Zammitt about our process in reporting and designing the site.
Coal questions and answers
Powering A Nation, July 31, 2009 – Since 2001, U.S. energy companies have proposed more than 150 new coal plants. But a loose network of environmental activists, aided by uncertain economic conditions, has forced plans for more than 100 of the plants to be abandoned. Dozens more are clogged up in the court systems. (The rest.)