EJN Trains Journalists How to Report on Environmental Issues

Sam Schramski is a Special Projects Editor with Earth Journalism Network, which engages journalists around the world to engage in environmental and climate journalism. The organization held a workshop for journalists this week to discuss data journalism as it pertains to fisheries data and related topics. He appeared on Open Your Eyes on Thursday and explained what it is they engage journalists on.

 

Sam Schramski, Special Projects Editor

“In order to do good environmental and climate journalism, you have to humanize your stories, even in a data story that seems very unhuman because it’s numbers and charts, etc., always ground your data stories and any environmental story you do in the human context. That’s how you hit home to your viewers, your listeners, your readers, your audience that the issues are important to them. These are existential issues: climate, bio-diversity, fisheries issues – I would say that even if you live in Belize City and you’re a professional and you don’t even go to the sea, you’re connected to your fisheries, right, in terms of whether you eat them, whether you have a relative who’s involved in fisheries sector. The economy of Belize as a whole is deeply connected to fisheries in many ways. So these are issues that, at their base are basically connective of humanity, so I think that’s the way that we really try to engage these environmental themes, these climate themes is by focusing on the human angle and the human sensibility.”