Press Herald joins Covering Climate Now project

The Portland Press Herald will publish a special series in September on the impacts of climate change on Maine that is part of an international effort by 170 news outlets to highlight the issue on the eve of a critical U.N. Climate Summit.

The project, called Covering Climate Now, was co-founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation and is aimed at strengthening the media’s focus on the climate crisis.

All outlets have committed to running a week’s worth of climate coverage in the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York on Sept. 23. At that meeting, the world’s governments will submit plans to meet the Paris Agreement’s pledge to keep global temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

The Press Herald will publish the first story in its series on Sunday, Sept. 15, with daily installments that will continue the newspaper’s commitment to covering the threats posed by climate change and how Maine people are responding.

“This is not just a one-time effort. Climate change is of great concern to many of our readers and we need a sustained commitment to cover it in depth,” said Cliff Schechtman, executive editor of the Portland Press Herald. “It’s that important.”

Covering Climate Now ranks as one of the most ambitious efforts ever to organize the world’s media around a single coverage topic. In addition to The Guardian – the lead media partner in Covering Climate Now – CJR and The Nation are joined by major newspapers, magazines, television and radio broadcasters, and global news and photo agencies in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Among the outlets represented are: Bloomberg; CBS News; El País; the Asahi Shimbun; La Repubblica; The Times of India; Getty Images; Agence France-Presse; national public TV broadcasters in Italy, Sweden, and the United States; most of the biggest public radio stations in the U.S.; scholarly journals such as Nature, Science, and the Harvard Business Review; and publications such as Vanity Fair, HuffPost, The National Observer, and The Daily Beast. Covering Climate Now also includes a wide array of local news outlets, such as The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Seattle Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Oklahoman, as well as nonprofit websites reporting from Rhode Island, Nevada, Turkey, Togo and dozens of places in between.

“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many organizations from across the U.S. and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists – to report this hugely important story.”

All of the news outlets participating will decide for themselves how many climate stories to run during the September week of coverage, and what those stories say. Some of the outlets participating in Covering Climate Now will share their climate coverage with one another.