A Video Journalist, Climate Change, and a Global Pandemic
The choice to become a journalist was an easy one; you could say it ran in her genes.
“My mom was a journalist and I grew up reading a lot of magazines,” says Meghan McDonough, a freelance, New York-based video journalist. “It was something that really fascinated me. I could spend hours on the couch with those magazines.”
Today, McDonough is a Gracie-award winning video journalist, covering a wide array of topics ranging from the mental health of Olympic athletes to the border wall’s impact on the environment. The journey began in high school where her first experience in journalism was, following in her mother’s footsteps, working for the school’s online magazine. From there, the help of some friends and her own longtime interest in video led to the creation of the school’s video-news program.
“It was my first collaborative experience,” she says. “There’s something that I really love about working on a project with multiple people.”
From there, McDonough went on to major in film and media studies at Amherst College, where she would later graduate magna cum laude. At the time, though, Amherst’s film program had only recently been formed, and thus was under-developed and under-enrolled. But the program’s youth worked to McDonough’s benefit, because it meant competition over equipment and space.
“They had all this gear that no one was using and studio space that no one was using. So outside of my film classes, I started a film series with a couple of friends called Show & Tell.”
A few years later found her working a brief stint for the Argentina Independent, during which she and a friend made their first documentary covering entrepreneurial immigrants. The project would come to be an important learning experience.
“We didn’t have that clear of a sense of how to make a documentary,” McDonough says. “We kind of just brought a camera and had a general idea of what we wanted to do. I wish we’d learned to outline a project beforehand.”
That knowledge would come from working for different publications, especially when she landed as an official video journalist at Quartz, There, she would work for a couple of years on an eclectic mix of subjects such as immortal jellyfish, or solar energy in Puerto Rico. However, 2020 brought the pandemic and the subsequent shutdown the Quartz video team, as many media other companies did, unexpectedly sending McDonough into the freelance world, where she’s been operating ever since.
Most of the projects McDonough works on are written, reported, edited, and produced herself. She does less of the filming these days, though. Since the pandemic began and made travel nigh-impossible, she’s been doing more interviews remotely, instead sending freelance videographers to do the on-site filming. For herself, freelance means no two days look exactly the same.
“Every day is different. I’m usually either scripting, editing, or planning the shoot,” she says. “I try to get my work done in the morning. That’s when I’m most awake and productive.”
Typically she’s working on multiple projects at once. Right now, that means one for Scientific American and one for NBC LX, where most of her current work goes. Nowadays she tends to cover pieces that are equity or climate related- sometimes, in the case of a recent piece on urban green space and climate change, both at once. Said piece follows members of El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, a public school in Brooklyn, as they fight for equity in their green spaces to protect themselves from climate change.
“I start my research figuring out what’s the topic I’m interested in, what’s a person or idea that has potential to be a story and then I start digging into it to find characters,” McDonough says. “I think I read a New York Times article about how the surface temperature in Central Park is like, 30 degrees cooler than it is in Harlem. That was really striking and fascinating to me.”
The next step was to search for and speak to New York-based environmental justice programs, of which she found many. One front-runner was WE ACT, a Harlem-based organization. But ultimately, knowing it would make a good visual story, McDonough chose El Puente.
“I decided on El Puente because they’ve been around for a really long time,” she says. “They have a community garden in their neighborhood- I knew I wanted to film that.”
The resulting piece focuses on the way that poorer, often redlined communities have been left behind in the development of green space, how it impacts the youth of the city, and how they’ve been left no choice but to fight back. It’s a stark example of how climate change, like many others, is an equity issue- but one with a solution.
“I really gravitate towards stories that are kind of solution oriented,” McDonough explains. “I find them to be very hopeful myself, but I also think they’re an interesting launching point- getting to the problem from the people who are closest to the problem, who can then offer the best solutions.”
