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Lisa Coutu and David Domke talk with Usha Lee McFarling (right) after her keynote speech on May 8.
Pulitzer-winning journalist speaks on challenges
of reporting science and environmental news
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Usha Lee McFarling gave the keynote speech at Communicating the Environment: An Interdisciplinary Student Conference on May 8, 2009. McFarling addressed, “A Cold Climate: The Challenges of Communicating Science & Environmental News in A Declining Media Environment.”
Watch the video:
Part 1 >>
Part 2 >>
About the keynote speech:
The mainstream media are in the midst of a rapidly accelerating decline, witnessed by widespread cutbacks and closures at a variety of once robust news outlets. In this talk, McFarling outlines why this media atrophy is especially devastating to the coverage of science and environmental topics. She uses examples from reportage on climate change to illustrate how vested interests from both the right and left side of the political spectrum attempt to hijack the narrative of the evolving climate science story to better fit their agendas. She argues that the shift from old media to new media techniques is leading to a loss of civic discourse as sources such as general interest newspapers and evening news broadcasts, which serve a wide political spectrum, are overwhelmed by new sources such as blogs, tweets and social networks, which are much more specifically targeted. She concludes by looking at several ways the rapidly shifting media landscape may evolve in the near future and discusses opportunities now arising in new media that offer the potential to improve the way science and environmental news is presented to and consumed by the public.
Usha Lee McFarling, a science journalist for nearly two decades, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. She has specialized in the coverage of climate change and in 2007 won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Writing for co-writing a multi-media series in the Los Angeles Times titled “Altered Oceans.” She earned an M.A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in the field of animal behavior and earned a B.A. degree in biology from Brown University.
