About this episode
How can and should the mainstream media cover climate change? My guest today is Peter Prengaman, global climate and environmental news director at the Associated Press. In today’s fractured and fast-changing news landscape, climate is usually the top story only during times of extreme weather. But its role in our lives is so fundamental, media organizations have no choice but to make more space for it in their reporting, even if they don’t always call it “climate”. As head of the climate desk at one of the world’s top news outlets, Peter’s insights into this topic—in terms of both his own swing into climate, as well as bigger questions about climate and media—are well worth a listen.
Notes and resources
Full transcript
Michael Gold (00:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Climate Swings, the show for people reaching for the next vine of climate and sustainability in their professional lives, produced in partnership with climate education and action platform, Terra.do. I’m your host, Michael Gold.
Michael Gold (00:21)
How can and should the mainstream media cover climate change? My guest today is Peter Prengaman, global climate and environmental news director at the Associated Press. In today’s fractured and fast-changing news landscape, climate is usually the top story only during times of extreme weather. But its role in our lives is so fundamental, media organizations have no choice but to make more space for it in their reporting, even if they don’t always call it climate. As head of the climate desk at one of the world’s top news outlets, Peter’s insights into this topic—in terms of both his own swing into climate, as well as bigger questions around climate and media—are well worth a listen. Here’s Peter.
Michael Gold (01:10)
Peter Prengaman, welcome to Climate Swings. It’s so great to have you here.
Peter Prengaman (01:15)
Thank you, Michael. It’s great to be here.
Michael Gold (01:17)
So can you just start with a quick sketch of your professional background and experience and what brought you to your current role?
Peter Prengaman (01:25)
Yeah, well, I’m a journalist. I’ve been a journalist about 25 years and worked for the Associated Press 22 years in various roles. I’ve been a reporter in Oregon, in Los Angeles. I’ve covered immigration as a beat reporter. I’ve worked as a foreign correspondent several years in Latin America. And I’ve been an editor in the Western US, overseeing lots of lots of large territories. And then I’m currently the global climate and environment news director, based in New York, and run a team of about 30 people around the world covering climate change. How did I come to this position? It’s been a kind of long and winding road. And one of those, when you look back and you realize like along the way you were gaining experiences that were going to help you do a certain thing in the future, but you didn’t know it at the time. So I guess I would start, you know, early in my career, I was based in the Caribbean. I covered a lot of natural disasters, hurricanes and floods and a lot of death. And in those days, I’m talking 2003 to 2005, we covered these stories just as natural disasters, right? Without any real thought that humans were partially behind some of what was happening. And then over the years, you know, I started realizing that there was more at work than just a really bad hurricane or, you know, really bad floods. There were all these kinds of issues that were part of it. Fast forward some years in my career, I helped cover the Gulf oil spill in 2010, you know, just ton of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, all kinds of destruction.
And so that really helped me start thinking about environmental issues a lot. And then some years later, I was based in Brazil and would help cover the Amazon mostly from afar, deforestation, some of the longstanding issues, of course, that we cover today. And then the job that I had right before this one, I was based in Phoenix, Arizona. I was the West editor and I oversaw 13 states in the Western US.
And I realized I had become a climate and environment editor because I was working on so many stories about water and about drought and wildfires. So all of these things came together when AP was looking to start a climate desk in 2022. It just, it was a very natural fit for me because I had all these experiences previously.
Michael Gold (04:15)
And the idea of starting a climate desk at the Associated Press, you said it started in 2022. What kind of were the considerations that went into it among the senior leadership? Was it basically the case that we needed dedicated reporters that sort of had climate just in all the headlines that they were writing?
Peter Prengaman (04:39)
Yeah. So AP covered climate and environment before, and covered it well, but it was all under the guise of the health and science department. And so that coverage, while strong was, was really focused on the science and the science of course is, is very important. But I think there was a realization at the AP as there has been at other news organizations that climate had just become too big for just looking at it through a science lens, because it’s something that really crosses into every aspect of our lives. And so the idea was to build a desk with expertise that could do a lot of stories on climate, help the greater AP do stories on climate, and try to make climate front and center of the report. So it’s not just a niche subject, you know, something that gets dealt with in an IPCC report or, you know, a nature report, but something that we look at as part of our coverage every single day. And so that’s been our mission the last couple of years. And I think we’ve really done that.
Michael Gold (05:48)
Yeah, I mean, guess because when you think of climate just on its face, it does sound like a science subject, right? But there are so many other elements of it. There’s economics, there’s sociology, obviously politics. So I guess how do you decide what stories are fundamentally climate and belong on your desk versus which ones might end up on one of those other desks?
Peter Prengaman (06:13)
It’s a good question. I think it’s, it’s at least between editors, it’s, a, it’s just a conversation of, of who is going to own a particular story. I mean, stories today on fashion, on technology, on extreme weather, on insurance, all of these things cross into climate. And so there’s a lot of, kind of cross pollination of, you know, business reporters and, fashion reporters and general reporters from around the world who are working on stories that have some climate element. And so our team will work with them on those stories just to make sure that the climate pieces are in there. And then also that we’re telling stories in a really holistic way. One thing that’s really important for our team is we really focus on people. Almost every story, we want characters. We want people who are experiencing climate change, whether they’re climate migrants in some part of India or people in North Carolina or most recently Spain, where there’s been some really strong rain and flooding, who are experiencing climate change on the front lines, or people in technology or business who are working on solutions to climate change. The stories have to be about people. And if stories are about people, it brings in readers. So I think one of, if there were any errors of the past, of just kind of journalism in general, it was 10, 15 years ago, making climate such a science story, when it’s really a people’s story.
Michael Gold (07:59)
Yeah, and you as the head of the desk have to think about what kind of reporters you want where and what kind of expertise you want them to have. How do you sort of think about that in shaping sort of this global climate picture that the AP puts out?
Peter Prengaman (08:19)
We try to think of our coverage in five buckets that of course then cross over into other things too. But we start really trying to think about it in five different ways. The first is extreme weather, right? You just can’t get away from this. And this is the way that we bring a lot of readers into the climate story. You just see it differently if you’re living through a heat wave, you know, if you’ve been in a place that’s really flooded, so we, we focus on extreme weather and with that comes impact, you know, human impact. We focus on policy, policies at, at lots of different levels, of course, at the, at the UN level, the climate talks, you know, the Conference of Parties, the things that are decided and negotiated, it’s important, but policy on local levels as well, wherever they’re like interesting policy stories, we want to cover them.
We cover accountability. That’s a that’s an another another area where you know companies or countries have made pledges and and we try to hold them to account of how much progress they’ve made towards pledges or when there are situations where people just out and out lied or greenwashed we try to you know, do stories on that—we—so that would be the third.
The fourth is—solutions are really important, I think, to our coverage. I think it’s where the climate story really is. There’s a lot of focus on solutions. And then the fifth one, green energy transition, which has a lot of overlap with solutions, but they’re also distinct. And so if you take all of those things together, that starts to form like, where you put resources and where you focus your stories because climate and environment is this just massive topic as you can imagine. And you could go down so many different rabbit holes that you could kind of get a little bit lost. So I think you have to really kind of focus and those are the areas that we focus on.
Michael Gold (10:30)
Are there areas that you think that maybe deserve a little bit more attention? I’m thinking perhaps like agriculture, buildings, water, land use. Are there places where you think that you’d like to further cultivate the AP’s climate coverage going forward?
Peter Prengaman (10:47)
Yes, yes, you mentioned agriculture. I mean, agriculture and actually water cut through all of those. We have two reporters in the US who are focused on the intersection of agriculture and climate change. So, you know, they do a lot. We have four different journalists in the US who are focused on the intersection of climate and water. So those two areas, you know, they come under, sometimes, accountability, sometimes solutions, sometimes those big buckets that I talked about. So we cover both of those areas pretty robustly. In terms of where else I would like us to go, I think I would like to see AP do more with weather. I think there’s just so much that goes on. We cover a lot of weather, a lot of the phenomenons, the things that happen. We did a few stories in the Spain story, which is ongoing, of the flooding, of looking at this weather phenomenon called a DANA, breaking that down, what that is, the relationship to those floods with climate change. Weather is an area I think we need to do more. I also think that we want to do more going forward with geoengineering, basically trying to correct certain things in the climate. This is of course still very controversial. A lot of scientists are against this kind of thing, basically arguing that we just don’t know the effects of, you know, letting things into the air or into the ocean and, you know, trying to, trying to change the chemistries of things to combat climate change. That’s true. But you really have started to see the last year that last year to that a lot of these ideas that were very fringe are now sort of getting more, you know, kind of mainstream coverage. And so I think that’s an area that, you know, that we need to be focused on as well.
Michael Gold (12:49)
Yeah. And when you look at the kind of people who engage most with your climate coverage, what kind of audience do you see resonates most? And is there a sense that maybe news organizations need to do more to reach unconventional audiences with climate stories? People that are maybe aren’t even convinced that climate change is a problem or that we need to do anything about it?
Peter Prengaman (13:12)
We try to reach absolutely everybody we can. I mean, you know, if you were to ask me who’s your typical reader, I would say, I hope we don’t have one. I hope it’s just, you know, across the board. And I think in particular, this is where solutions coverage is really important, and green energy coverage. Because if you can do stories that focus on people and focus on technology and focus on things that are being done to combat climate change, you can do stories and be successful sometimes without even mentioning climate change because it’s become such a political thing that sometimes people shut off. So that’s something that we’re really cognizant about. I mean, we don’t pull any punches—when you have to say things, you have to say them. Not every story can be positive, but every story also shouldn’t be negative either. So, you know, we’re trying, whether it’s young audiences, younger audiences and working with them, you know, engaging with them in Instagram and different social media or traditional audiences, you know, in newspapers or broadcasts. We’re trying to reach as many people as possible. And I’ve made it a goal of mine as well to reach out to our most conservative customers because AP has thousands of customers around the world, and to make sure that I know what they want as well. I mean, we want our stories to go to as many people as we can.
Michael Gold (14:43)
And I presume that sort of audience interest and audience growth in this subject is growing, right? You probably are seeing more interest in stories that look at climate from different lenses and take different angles on it, is that right?
Peter Prengaman (14:58)
Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. There have been moments in the last years where climate coverage has been the top stories read on AP’s website. So AP has APNews.com, which is customer facing. And then we also go directly to thousands of customers. And so we’re able to track a sliver of the people who come to our websites; it’s harder to track what all our customers do, like around the world. But we can track who comes to the website and often climate is in the top five, in the top 10 of stories, even during very busy news periods. So yes, there is, I’d say, increasing interest in climate in part because of what we’ve lived the last few years with so much extreme weather. And then in part because we’re in the middle, whether we realize it or not, we’re in the middle of a green energy transition, so more and more people are saying, huh, I’m interested in electric vehicles, or I’m interested in geothermal heating, or a heat pump, or all kinds of things that now are really becoming part of the vernacular. So all of that, I think, drives the interest in climate stories.
Michael Gold (16:15)
Can you talk about some of the fave, your favorite pieces that the AP has put out in recent years? Some, some pieces that maybe surprised you or had an unexpected little tidbit that you didn’t, you didn’t see coming.
Peter Prengaman (16:29)
Boy, there’s just so many. One, I’ll mention a couple of things that we’ve tried to look at very broadly. We, we had a series a couple of years ago when we first started looking at climate migration and we did 15 stories around the world, basically going places and, seeing people who had been forced to move because of climate change. That, that story, broadly, or that series of stories, I think, brought a lot of readers into the climate story. And we still get notes about some of these stories because they were really well-told human tales, visually driven. You see people who are in their new places or people who are in their old homes or being forced to move. Those were really, really poignant that I think grabbed a lot of people.
In a similar vein, I mentioned we have a current series looking at what indigenous peoples around the world are doing to adapt to climate change and to combat climate change, because indigenous peoples really are on the front lines in many ways and hold the keys, I think, to some of the best solutions. There’s a whole kind of a movement, we’ll say, of getting land back. I mean, there’s a land back movement, but, but just in general, I think increasing awareness of how indigenous peoples have managed land for thousands of years in very successful ways. So that’s been a really interesting series looking at different places around the world where people are part of that solution. But then in terms of big historic things, I guess I would mention last year in Dubai for COP28, you know, the world agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. And there are people who will say, well, boy, that’s like 30 years too late, you know, and it’s, and it’s just talk and, and, and there’s—those arguments are valid, right? I think there’s validity in those arguments. But at the same time, it was a very monumental thing to, to recognize at that level, the problem, and that’s the burning of fossil fuels, and the need to transition away from them and use them in the ways that we do, in more clean ways. I mean, fossil fuels have also built humanity. I mean, there’s a lot to it, but I think that was a really significant thing that was really kind of in-line with like the Paris Agreement of 2015 and some of the other big moments in climate negotiation history.
Michael Gold (19:27)
And sort of going a level up from just the AP, the climate media landscape has expanded dramatically in the last couple of years. How do you see this landscape taking shape in terms of both legacy media that are adding climate desks like the AP or doing more climate coverage, but also kind of among the more niche players, the more specialized players in climate coverage?
Peter Prengaman (19:56)
I think for journalism organizations, no matter their size, there’s no getting away from climate. You have to cover it in one form or another. So I think you’ll see more growth in climate desks and in that focus in the years to come. At the same time though, because climate is becoming such a central story to so many things, I think you’ll see more climate editors and climate reporters kind of integrate like further into into different news organizations. So in other words, you you’ll see an increase maybe in the next couple of years, I think. But you also maybe some years from now start to see a little bit of a decrease just because it’s so central to what we’re all covering anyway, you know, and and I think at a certain point, people who are not comfortable with the climate story become comfortable with the climate story. We’ve had many of them the last several years. And I think those have been some of our biggest successes of when our team works with people from AP around the world who have not necessarily covered climate change, but they’re interested in something, then they do a story or two and they’re like, wow, okay, I can really see how these stories are compelling.
Michael Gold (21:21)
And what do you personally read to stay up to date on things? I know there, as I mentioned, there are a lot of smaller, more niche climate media organizations. Are there any that you feel like are doing a really standout job that you want to mention or anything else that, that you want to say about how you keep, keep abreast of latest, latest developments in the space?
Peter Prengaman (21:44)
There are many people who are doing great jobs. What do I read? I read absolutely everything that I can. I read, of course, the New York Times and The Guardian and Reuters and The Economist and Covering Climate Now. I read various newsletters, the Society of Environmental Journalists. I read Carbon Brief.
Yeah, I’m sure I’ll get off and think, man, I should have mentioned this or that group. But there are many who are doing excellent work. And for me, it’s really important. I spend a good amount of my day each day really seeing what is overall in the landscape just to make sure that we’re staying competitive.
Michael Gold (22:39)
Yeah, and being on a climate beat, you’re obviously dealing with a lot of very dark stories, a lot of very troubling stories. You mentioned solutions-oriented journalism, but how do you keep yourself motivated? How do you prevent yourself from just feeling like there’s nothing we can do or the path ahead is just too dark to contemplate?
Peter Prengaman (23:05)
I think there are a lot of things. If you look back, say, even 10 years ago, and you looked at the models of CO2 into the atmosphere and other greenhouse gases, and the warming that we were going to see, they shoot up like this. All kinds of different models, you can see that we get the four degrees increase Celsius, which is just catastrophic for human life.
If you compare that today to those same models, it’s vastly different. Now, is it that we’ve done such a great job at bending the curve, humanity’s done such a great job that we’re going to be able to keep in line with the Paris Agreement of 1.5 degrees, like not to go beyond that of warming? No, no, we’re not. I mean, we’re on track for more than that, two degrees, two and a half degrees in the next, we’ll say 60, 70, 80 years, depending on the model.
But when you see those things and you think about it, you realize that strides are being made, right? That the big picture may feel negative, but there are really positive things that are happening. If you look at electricity generation, as another example, in 2023, 30% of electricity generated around the world was generated by renewables. So there are major things that are happening that are starting to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, away from fuels that really contribute to climate change. So there are positive things. when you meet young activists and you see the work that they’re doing and you meet people who are working on different technologies that are really trying to confront these issues.
Of course there’s greenwashing. There’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of noise that you have to work through, but there are many positive things that are happening. And so I think for me, I try to keep all those things in perspective and not fall into just the gloom and doom. And even if it was just gloom and doom, I mean, think as a journalist, my job and my team’s job is to not to tell people what to think, but to help them know what to think about. And so that’s kind of where the limits, I think, of the role of a journalist come in. We’re not advocates. I’m not here to say, this is the way the world has to move, or this is the fuel that you should use, or you shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not here for that. That’s not my job. That’s not the role of journalists and because if we go that route, then people won’t believe us or trust us, you know.
Michael Gold (26:06)
Yeah. And thinking back earlier in your career, you mentioned that climate coverage sort of started to seep in without you necessarily seeking it out, right? When you were covering the Amazon in Brazil, you were covering the American West. Was there any kind of moment that you started thinking, wait a minute, I am a climate journalist now? How did that gel with the sort of external environment and the discussion around climate change? Because for a long time, people just weren’t really talking about it. It was not part of the major discussions at a policy level or at a social level. So if you could talk about that evolution a little bit a little bit more detail, that would be pretty interesting.
Peter Prengaman (26:51)
I think the time that I realized it probably was working on stories around the Colorado River basin because the situation today is dire, though perhaps a little bit better than it was a few years ago, when I’m talking about, when it was just a point where there are parts of it where the river wasn’t flowing.
You, I mean, and so then you try to back up and you say, okay, how are we going to get water for 40 million people that this, you know, supports? What’s the future of farming? Because, you know, so many farms are, you know, dependent on the Colorado River. How do indigenous rights fall into all of this? Because they were left out of Colorado compact.
And so a lot of those things had to be negotiated. And I think it was just kind of like this confluence of factors when it was like, God, know, the federal authorities are going to cut so much water from each of these states. And what’s that going to mean for these states? Then, you know, here are these people, you know, indigenous tribes that, you know, had been, had been left out of this in the beginning who were vying for their rights. And all of those things came together. And I think it just made me realize like how complex climate was because the, the backdrop of all of that is this is just going to get worse. You know, it’s like this year is bad and the authorities will do it. But what does this look like in five years or 10 years or 15 years? And so I think that it was probably in, you know, the year, I’ll say in, I don’t know, ’20, ’21, ’22 that, that I realized something had changed for me in my interest in this, that, something huge was happening, and that’s of course climate change, which I knew, but sometimes when you work on things, you realize how important it is to you.
Michael Gold (28:51)
And in terms of the climate journalism workforce, what kind of trends are you seeing? Is it just an expanding pool of people that want to get into this space, that want to cover climate stories? And especially in terms of the evolution that sort of you went through where they maybe were covering something else and then they started, you know, a light went off over their head and they realized, wait a minute, I’m kind of a climate reporter now. Are you seeing that trend increasing as well?
Peter Prengaman (29:21)
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And I can look at people in both the AP and in companies outside AP who have become climate and environment reporters in the last years. And I think you’re going to see that continue. I also see a lot of the young people coming out with much more experience in climate coverage or at least like climate foundations, coming out of university, certainly than I had and a lot of journalists had or didn’t even have. And I think that it’s to the point where every journalist at some point in their career I think is gonna cross into climate stories no matter what you cover.
And so it’s good to have a foundation of the science of climate, of some of the basics. And so it’s something that I advocate for at AP. And then we also do some training outside of AP for journalists to try to, part of our mission is to help other teams do more and more sophisticated climate stories. And so we do some external training and the mission is very much to, to make people comfortable with climate and to get them to see that it’s going to be part of what they do, you know, regardless.
Michael Gold (30:51)
Yeah, I was going to ask about training specifically. Can you go into that in a little bit more detail and maybe just talk about how you see the overall education and training landscape for climate journalism nowadays?
Peter Prengaman (31:05)
Yeah. So I’ll mention a couple of different things that our team has done that just kind of give a flavor. We’ve done big trainings, we’ve done small trainings. We’ve done trainings that—some of the coolest ones are trainings that combine training with collaboration. And we did one of these in India last year. We worked with Press Trust of India, which is a major news organization in India. One of the biggest, one of the most read and seen in all its platforms and it’s a big customer for AP as well. And what we did was a workshop with several journalists from Press Trust of India who, you know, are very well-established journalists, but had not really covered climate in a big way. And one of the reasons that we did this is because Press Trust of India wanted to do more climate and environment. India, as you know, is just like, it’s a hugely important story in climate, both for the causes of climate change—it’s a huge population, lots of energy needs, lot of dirty energy in the form of coal—but then also the solutions and lots of solar, lots, I mean, India is just super central. And so we did this workshop over a week where we teamed up AP reporters with reporters from Press Trust of India and they built stories together basically in Kochi, India, where they would go out, work on things together, and then we co-published those stories. Several of those reporters, who were already well-established, strong reporters for Press Trust of India, now cover climate as their beat full-time.
So we’ve done things like that. Our agriculture team, Melina Walling and Joshua Bickel, recently did a training, a smaller one for Boyds where they invited people to learn about climate change around agriculture, you know, and how to kind of connect those things. You know, that was a smaller online training. We’ve just done, we’ve done so many and I think that it helps just to give people confidence to cover climate because even today in 2020, or even with very smart journalists, sometimes the first thing you hear is, well, boy, I don’t really know that much. Or I don’t know enough about the science. And all of that’s important. But in doing, you can start to build. And it’s just like good reporting on anything. If you don’t understand something fully, keep reading and talking to people until you do.
Michael Gold (33:52)
Yeah, and a lot of young people, especially these days, have a sense that they need to do everything they can to combat climate change, that it’s an existential crisis, that their generation is going to be at the forefront of, and it’s no going back, essentially. But when you’re talking to young and aspiring journalists and you’re doing this kind of training, how do you make sure that they are keeping a reporter’s mindset about it and it’s not becoming advocacy, kind of as you mentioned earlier.
Peter Prengaman (34:26)
I think it’s just an important part of the conversation always, with young reporters and, and with our team and, know, with our, with our senior leaders team as well, because you, you, just have to be careful. You know, you, you sometimes when you cover something, cause you’re human, you, you can feel connected to it and, and that’s okay. And that’s, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you do have to step back and say, and remember your role, I think, because the second that you forget that you can lose credibility. And, and, and that’s the most important thing. So it’s just something I, you know, I, I bring up, and, I also push our reporters and I push people that I work with and I push myself to try to think of counter narratives, right? To, to, to consider other things to, to see that, you know, a wind project somewhere, while it’s wind energy, and we might say, well, you we don’t want to go for the, the conspiracies, because there’s a lot of conspiracies and a lot of, you know, attacking of green energy. While we, while we want to be careful of that, we also want to steer clear of any idea that, that it’s somehow perfect because, because it’s clean energy, right? I mean, there can be abuses and, all kinds of things, even, even when a project on its face is, it should be a good thing. You know, so I think it’s just a constant like reminder for all of us. We are nobody’s friend and it’s our job to report the news as we see it and be as fair as possible.
Michael Gold (36:09)
And obviously there’s a lot, there are a lot of people nowadays who are getting their “news” in scare quotes on social media where mis- and disinformation are rife. And you mentioned conspiracies about wind farms, for example. What can, what can people do? Can the—what can the traditional or the sort of respected established media do about this phenomenon to counter it?
Peter Prengaman (36:35)
I think we just have to keep doing stories that, that debunk it. I mean, the debunk them. There’s no, you know, there’s no, there’s no magic. There’s no, there’s no other way than to just keep doing strong journalism and putting that out over and over and hope, of course, reaching new audiences, getting people to engage in different ways. I mean, you don’t, don’t want to just do it old-school style, but, but, the basics are the basics of journalism and to just to keep those, to keep those out there and and then, and then, you know, when you have a chance to engage with people, I think that’s important. You have to be careful because sometimes people will, you know, take something that you say online or social media. You’ve got to be extremely careful. But if, if you put out a story, you know, as, as we did, for example, earlier this year, we put out a fact-check story looking at what we knew about whales and offshore wind, because there are, there are plenty of people—the former president, Donald Trump, in the campaign has said several times that wind is hurting whales, right? And this is something that people believe. And so we did a fact-check story that looked at exactly like what we know and what we don’t know. And the upshot is there’s really no evidence that, that whales are being hurt in big ways from the sound of offshore wind, but there’s still a lot of studying that needs to happen. And there’s a lot of things that we don’t know. So anyway, we put out this story. I posted it on LinkedIn and, I had, you know, I had several people write and attack me and attack the reporters and stuff. Within that, there were people who, who wrote and, had thoughtful things and, you know, put links of things that they wanted me to see. And like, if it’s, if it’s a good dialogue, like I’ll engage with that, you know, and I, and I think that as reporters and editors, we should do some of that, you know, carefully, carefully, but it’s a chance, it’s a chance to educate somebody. It’s a chance to get more educated yourself, you know, and to have a dialogue because you never want to get to the point where it’s like, you know, I know so much or I’m so open-minded, You can’t tell me any different. Like that’s not the goal either, right? So we’ve got to engage. We’ve got to engage with people.
Michael Gold (39:05)
Yeah, and as a seasoned journalism professional, what is your view on getting tips and sources from social media? Do you encourage your staff to do that? Do you try to make sure that they sort of have a warier mindset about it? What’s your view on that?
Peter Prengaman (39:21)
No, no, they should. Yeah, no, they should engage in social media, get tips from social media, get sources from social media, you know, but whether it comes from social media or somebody you meet at a conference or, the process is the same really of vetting, of fully understanding, you know, what’s at play, who has an axe to grind, you know, why somebody wants you to know this, those kinds of things. Social media is as good a starting point as any other, but it’s a starting point.
Michael Gold (39:54)
Right, right, yeah, exactly. Well, I think that covers a whole lot of information. And Peter, I just want to say that I think it’s really important for the media to engage in climate discussions and in climate topics. I think a lot of people have a lot of misunderstandings about the media’s role in this. So I really, really thank you so much for your time in this. Is there anything else that you want to say or any other messages you want to get across for my audience?
Peter Prengaman (40:22)
I would just say to people, you know, really engage in the climate story. If you haven’t before, and maybe you said to yourself, I read stories in the past and they were doom and gloom, give it another chance because the AP and many, many other news organizations are doing really strong work around climate that really do show you readers that it’s something that intersects in every part of our lives and all of us need to be engaged, so give it a chance if you’re not a reader of climate and tell us what you think.
Michael Gold (41:04)
Great, well, thank you so much again for your time. I really, really appreciate it.
Peter Prengaman (41:09)
Thank you. It’s been, I’ve really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you, Michael.
Michael Gold (41:15)
Climate Swings is produced, hosted, and edited by me, Michael Gold, with promotional support from climate education and action platform, Terra.do. Opinions expressed on the show are exclusively those of the guests and do not reflect the views of Terra.do, its founders or employees. Show notes, transcripts, and other material can be found on the podcast section of my website, wordclouds.consulting/climateswings.
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