Q&A: Frank Mungeam on how connecting journalists with scientists improves climate coverage
Frank Mungeam is Chief Innovation Officer for the Local Media Association, which helps develop sustainable business models for news with over 3,000 local media organizations across the country.
Mungeam oversees the Covering Climate Collaborative, bringing together local newsrooms and science partners to report on the effects of climate change and investigate climate solutions.
We caught up with Mungeam to hear about the successes and challenges of the collaborative — and why collaboration is so important for tackling the major issue of climate change.
WF: How did you get started in journalism?
FM: For decades, I worked in broadcast TV. I started as a local TV assistant producer, serving coffee and croissants on a morning talk show, and I worked my way up to management and leadership. I’ve always been interested in how to meet our audiences where they are and try to help our peers in the industry adapt to changing media habits as quickly as our audience.
I then went to Arizona State University for two years on a Knight fellowship to work on news innovation. Now at Local Media Association, it’s all about helping companies transform to be sustainable. My passion has always been local because local news organizations are the most trusted. Local is where we live and where we can take action. A lot of the problems we have are so big, it’s not obvious what you or I can do. At the local level, that’s where you can start.
WF: Why is collaboration important in your work?
FM: It’s like the Marvel superheroes — nobody has got all the superpowers, but everyone has got a superpower. In these complicated times, where most newsrooms have business and audience challenges, it’s really important to form strategic partnerships to be a collaborator and combine strengths while making up for weaknesses. When things get hard, that’s when you form community.
A lot of what’s so appealing — and frankly, essential — about collaboration is that it’s a way to be better faster by combining strengths across a group of peers who have a common mission. I’m a huge believer in the value of collaboration. Unfortunately, a lot of us have a history where the news business was defined by competition. It was against instinct and culture to collaborate with other news organizations — we scooped or broke the story. We had a non-cooperative approach to information. If the goal is to serve and inform our community, that’s not a healthy habit.
WF: How did LMA go about creating the Covering Climate Collaborative?
FM: We started with a belief that climate science is a category of expertise and that we should partner with science experts. We lined up a best-in-class roster of science partners who committed to share knowledge, trainings, resources, and data that journalists could use. We partner with SciLine, which is a free service that connects journalists with scientists on a topic. We also collaborate with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication on climate opinion polling, and Climate Central, which works with local newsrooms on research and data visualizations.
The second part of our collaboration strategy is to be multi-platform. We intentionally wanted to represent and reach all the audiences that consume information about climate. You or I might prefer to read, but the data is pretty clear that the average person might like to watch, or listen. Our collaborative has 25 local newsrooms from around the country — and it’s a pretty even mix between print, digital, local TV broadcast, and local radio. There’s a skill to storytelling for the ear that is different and complementary to the skill for visual storytelling or writing a longform piece.
I believe that everyone in our field can learn from each other in terms of developing dexterity across those platforms. It sort of begs the question about why we’re here. If you’re trying to win awards, that’s about you. If you’re trying to reach people where they are and get them good information, then you care a lot about the platform and how you’re delivering — and you’ll want to be everywhere they might be.
WF: How exactly is the collaborative organized?
FM: It matters how you structure a collaborative and what your premise for creating value is. We applied the insight that climate change is a planet-size problem that is really too big for any one of us. And yet, it is quite personal to us, and right in all of our backyards. So we organized by regional areas of interest. Of the 25 newsrooms, we have 5 regions: West, Southwest, Gulf Coast, Great Lakes, and Southeast. Each of those areas has a very natural core climate focus.
In the West, it’s wildfires and air quality. In the Southwest, it’s water, drought, and heat. In the Gulf Coast, it’s extreme weather events, like hurricanes. In the Southeast, it’s sea level rise and flooding. In the Midwest group, we’ve got active membership in Detroit and Chicago, and they do a lot of equity and social justice reporting. In our major metropolitan areas, any climate change story is a social justice story.
WF: What are some of the biggest successes for the collaborative?
FM: Our newsrooms have really valued our science partners. We launched on Earth Day 2021, and we just did a survey of all our newsrooms on our one-year anniversary, and asked, “What has been most valuable to you, and what would you like more of in the second year?”
The number one thing the newsrooms assigned value to was the easy access and connections to our science partners — their expertise, the data, and information on how to accurately interpret and report the data. If you’re a climate reporter in your newsroom, you’re probably on your own. You probably don’t have another person in the newsroom who you can talk shop with on the science of climate reporting.
WF: And what have been some of the biggest challenges?
FM: Collaboration is fantastic in theory, but it’s tough in practice. I think it’s really important for people to have realistic expectations. Collaboration takes more time than going at it alone. It’s the famous proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone — if you want to go far, go together. Understand that it will take more time to do a story collaboratively with others, but in the long run, you get better results.
WF: Overall, what are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned, and what’s next for the collaborative?
FM: After we did our first annual survey with our partners, I was convinced that every news collaborative needs to do more surveys. We really pushed every partner, happy or unhappy, to fill out the survey. We got over 80% response rate, so I was really confident in the results. It was valuable data for us to be sure the collaborative is actually adding value to the newsrooms.
We learned that half the problem was discoverability. Coming out of that, we got a grant from Google News Initiative to partner with Distributed Media Lab and build a story sharing platform to see the latest stories by region. We were able to launch coveringclimate.org, which is a landing page where anybody can go — either news partners or the public — and see all the great local reporting that’s happening on climate.
Overall, we want to help our partners get their reporting in front of larger audiences. According to the members of the collaborative, a newsletter is next on the wish list. This isn’t just a strategy that one of us at LMA decided on — we asked our collaboration members what was important to them — and we’re going to help build that.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
