over the course of the summer, i wrote six articles. for each one, i conducted interviews, researched assigned topics, and analyzed research papers. once a draft was completed, i sent it to my editor, jeremy hance, who provided me with constructive feedback that always pushed me to be a better writer. jeremy’s edits went beyond what i typically receive as a reporter, as the edits were written to help me improve as a writer, in addition to helping my article improve.

to me, this internship experience meant a place to grow and refine my scientific reporting skills. being encouraged to explore a topic in ways i find newsworthy was quite liberating. the constructive feedback genuinely improved my writing ability, while the complex topics challenged my explanatory skills.

these complex topics were the challenge of my internship experience. when you become so enveloped in a topic, you forget the baseline knowledge readers often have. explaining the relationship between rising temperatures, climate change, and a high african wild dog mortality rate becomes more difficult the more you learn. for this specific story, my editor and i went back and forth, draft after draft, attempting to adequately explain how a study approached this subject. 

a personal highlight for me was having an article republished with nowthis. when i was in high school, nowthis was a publication i came across often due to their short explanatory, and often viral videos. seeing an article i wrote for mongabay published by them was somewhat of a full-circle moment for me. the fact that another publication wanted to republish my article also meant that someone else thought my writing was at the least intriguing!

mongabay really allowed me to develop as a reporter on my own. the topics challenged me, my editors pushed me to be better, and i am finishing my internship confident in my scientific reporting ability.

to read my reporting for mongabay, click here.

1. look at how the area has changed over time due to climate change.

john sutter, a documentary filmmaker and national geographic explorer, spoke at the 2021 planet forward virtual summit on his current project. sutter used the visual history of one area to tell the story of climate change. sutter showed how the prized catch-of-the-day fish from the 1960s were larger and nearly unrecognizable to the fish we see today, through comparisons of photographs and documents from over the years.

2. talk to the people directly affected by climate change.

al roker, “nbc’s today show” weather forecaster, uses his platform to travel the globe and amplify the voices of those directly affected by climate change. as a member of nbc’s climate unit, he interviews those experiencing changing landscapes and weather phenomena in their backyard. during the summit, roker highlighted the importance of having your environmental storytelling represent and reflect your diverse audience.

3. listen, explain and interpret the data for your audience.

phoenix mayor kate gallego battles the effects of rising temperatures 145 days of the year where her city faces temperatures in the triple digits. gallego’s goal is to shape climate-friendly policy while implementing safe and protective measures for her citizens to combat the heat. by collecting data on phoenix’s annual rising temperatures and creating projection models, gallego incorporates the information into a city-wide objective of making phoenix a “heat ready city.” by informing the public on what the data and the models indicate, phoenix residents can better prepare while phoenix city officials implement protective measures to help alleviate the threat of phoenix’s scorching temperatures.

4. feature voices from younger generations.

it is essentially common knowledge that the younger generations will bear witness to the worst climate change has to offer. for planet forward student contributors william walker and adora shortridge, they use their platforms to inspire hope and shed light on fresh ideas on methods of combating climate change. during their question and answer session with summit host, frank sesno and george washington university’s national geographic visiting professor of science communication lisa palmer, walker and shortridge discussed their research on playground temperatures in arizona. by highlighting younger voices and showing the impact they create, a more personal connection can be made with younger members of your audience.

5. connect climate change to current events and trends.

the final keynote conversation of the summit was with newly appointed environmental protection agency administrator michael s. regan. regan is the first black man to lead the department, and an alumnus of north carolina agricultural & technical state university and george washington university’s trachtenberg school of public policy and public administration. regan’s position at the environmental protection agency connects a story about climate change to politics, health and much more. if the goal is to make climate change more relevant to your audience, connect it to other issues and topics your audience may find relevant or interesting. ultimately, climate change affects everything.

i stumbled into science reporting, so i thought lisa palmer’s science reporting class would be a good way to dive in.

in class, we learned how essential science reporters are for the public’s knowledge of what goes on around them, and it became even more apparent as coronavirus news dominated discussions in class. my mentor for my environment reporting internship at the guardian, emily holden, simply puts it in her twitter bio, “i report what people do to the environment and what it does back to them.” 2020 is a banner year for science reporting – news sources are our lifelines for coronavirus information and interpreting the effects of climate change, which are only getting worse. as simple as it is, i came back to emily’s twitter bio often throughout my internship.

my first and second stories were studies that emily picked up from alerts – a new study showed that 1,000 metric tons of microplastics rain down on our protected parks each year and the other linked air pollution to an increased risk of childhood obesity. they were both short write-ups but came with plenty of lessons about fact-checking and connecting that science to the audience, which we talked a lot about in professor palmer’s class. science reporters are interpreters. it’s hard for scientists to communicate with the general public. their studies are filled with complex figures and niche terms that are lost on the public, and interviewing them means being willing to ask dumb questions to get to the meat of their research. 

i became very, very comfortable with asking those dumb questions. in an interview for the article “60% of fish species could be unable to survive in current areas by 2100 – study,” one of the scientists even laughed at one of my questions. it was a blow to my ego, but it ended up being an important part of the article. i learned to fact check every single line because if you get something wrong, readers will let you know, and sometimes they’re not so nice about it. about 15 minutes after i published the story “rare shark attack in maine may be linked to marine protection efforts“, i received an email from a shark scientist accusing me of spreading false alarmist messaging about shark attacks. after a phone call with her, i tweaked the headline and some of the descriptions of shark migration and walked away with the important lesson to always fact check your sources – even if they’re trusted scientists.

then i learned to always relate the science to the readers. microplastics are raining down on protected parks, but so what? that’s where i learned to dig deep and do that extra research to make that human link, like finding health concerns, inequities, or what our political leaders are doing (or not doing) about it. it was challenging to find that connection for some articles, especially “alarm as pesticides spur rapid decline of us bird species,” but also in some other articles like “coronavirus pandemic prompts record drop in global emissions, study finds.” but scientists can help you find that connection too, and i learned to always ask a version of “so what” in my interviews.

in the article “congress approves billions for us national parks in rare bipartisan push,” i had to make that connection to science through policy, which required i brush up on some civics. after reporting mostly studies, this article was a nice break – the policy led me to the science, and usually it’s the opposite. i learned to use people and the money to explain the impact this bill would have on the environment, which was a good reminder to always look at the bigger picture of science in the community.

i struggled with this the most on a feature story i worked on for the entirety of the internship. it was an analysis of trees in america’s big cities, which seems like a trivial topic but once i started looking into it, many cities were bad at planting trees in lower-income and black neighborhoods, taking away their shade in one of the hottest summers on record. it was a frustrating article – i always needed more information, another interview, something else to pull the story together, and then digesting those weeks of reporting into 800 words took a lot of trial and error. but i always came back to what i learned in professor palmer’s class and asked myself, what information do people care about? what science matters in this story? and am i interpreting those facts? looking back, this article was a culmination of all the fact-checking and science communication skills i’d developed in class and throughout the internship. after weeks of analyzing city policy, reading climate plans, and talking to community members, i finally published: “us cities are spending millions on trees to fight heat – but are their plans equitable?“

the most important realization i walked away from this internship with is that science reporting is crucial for the time we’re living in. our feeds are clogged with misinformation and opinions, not facts, about science, and science reporters are on the frontlines of fighting those false narratives. every article i wrote was a piece to a puzzle showing the big picture of climate change. looking back, it’s scary. my articles tell a story of climate change disproportionately affecting minorities, causing major health issues, killing thousands of species, ruining our land. but they all put us one step closer towards understanding the science behind what we do to the earth and what it does back to us.