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Local Climate Change Reporting: Assessing the Impacts of Climate Journalism Workshops

"Prior research suggests that climate stories are rarely reported by local news outlets in the United States. As part of the Climate Matters in the Newsroom project}a program for climate-reporting resources designed to help journalists report local climate stories}we conducted a series of local climate-reporting workshops for journalists to support such reporting. Here, we present the impacts of eight workshops conducted in 2018 and 2019}including participant assessments of the workshop, longitudinal changes in their climate-reporting self-efficacy, and the number and proportion of print and digital climate stories reported. We learned that participants found value in the workshops and experienced significant increases in their climate-reporting self-efficacy in response to the workshops, which were largely sustained over the next 6 months. We found only limited evidence that participants reported more frequently on climate change after the workshops}possibly, in part, due to the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the news industry. These findings suggest that local climate-reporting workshops can be a useful but not necessarily sufficient strategy for supporting local climate change reporting. Further research is needed to illuminate how to support local climate reporting most effectively." (Abstract)