By Anders Lorenzen
What is wrong with coverage of the UN climate talks and with climate change in general? After several years of watching inadequate reporting of UN climate talks which collapsed followed the failed Cop15 conference in Copenhagen in 2009, Israeli journalist Ido Liven decided to do something to get the topic back in global news coverage at the Cop 19 summit currently being held in Warsaw, Poland.
The result was Climate News Mosaic, a so called decentralised news project. Ido grouped together journalists from across the globe who would report on Cop 19 developments – their reporting would be fed into the projects live blog which is hosted by The Earth Journalism Network. But those journalists would also feed their stories back to their retrospective countries with the aim of increasing the volume of news the summit gathered in those countries. This was achieved by media partnering with relevant news organisations.
But in order to achieve this, funding would be necessary and a fundraising campaign was set up on the crowdfunding platform indigogo. “Everything was really relying on the fundraising to be successful for the project to go ahead, we did not have a back up plan and luckily it was successful” Ido said to me in a Skype conversation. A total of $6,025 was raised, $25 more than their goal.
Ido highlighted the need for climate issue to get the coverage that urgency of the threat presents us: “Since Copenhagen in 2009, media attention has declined dramatically. Specifically it doesn’t get a lot of media attention. We get scientists constantly highlighting the urgency, while media attention declines” .
Ido is worried about the lack of progress in the talks but tries to stay optimistic and hope Climate News Mosaic will offer a new and different approach and will start the revolution in climate reporting he says is so badly needed.
Sub edited by Charlotte Paton
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Categories: AndersLorenzen, crowdfunding
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