Environment and climate change reporting is now more important than ever, but the media faces continuing challenges in covering these topics, given shrinking newsrooms, threats to reporters and limited resources, to name a few. That’s where EJN comes in.
Education and Capacity-Building
Since we launched in 2004, EJN has trained more than 14,000 journalists from dozens of countries on a wide variety of environmental issues, including climate change, biodiversity, forests, water, environmental health, oceans, fisheries and coastal resources. We have also provided more than 500 Fellowships so that individual journalists can attend and report on important conferences, summits and convenings, including the UN Climate and Biodiversity COPs, the World Conservation Congress, the World Water Forum and many others. These opportunities allow journalists from developing countries to attend and report on negotiations they might otherwise not have access to for their audiences back home.
Network Creation
Our network connects thousands of journalists from around the world with an interest in covering issues related to the environment and climate change. We now have more than 14,000 journalist members registered on our website from more than 180 countries, and thousands of additional followers on social media. We also moderate email listservs connecting more than 2,000 journalists. In addition, we help establish local networks of environmental journalists or collaborate with existing ones. These networks then become our active partners, working with local journalists in local languages, and in most cases are self-sustaining institutions that can provide their members with reporting resources and training programs.
Story Production
As a direct result of our activities, these journalists – working in print, radio, TV and online – have produced roughly 12,800 stories, not to mention all the environmental coverage they go on to produce afterwards. Many of these stories have resulted from the hundreds of grants we’ve given out to support original reporting on topics that don’t otherwise receive much coverage. This now includes an increasing number of ground-breaking investigative stories. Visit our Stories page to read them.
GeoJournalism
EJN also supports the production of other types of content and is a pioneer of GeoJournalism, online platforms that visualize environmental and Earth Science data, generate custom maps and display stories in a variety of formats. We’ve so far supported the creation of 10 regionally based environmental news platforms, most of which seek to combine journalists’ stories with map-based visualized data, giving narrative storytelling important scientific context. Check out our GeoJournalism page for more details.