Analysis and Opinion on the Climate and Sustainability Debate, edited @Chair of Climate Communication, University of Hamburg
As a follow-up on our Nature Climate Change study (Brüggemann et al. 2017) called “The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public”, we have now published a working paper tracing changes in public attitudes and behavioral intentions over a longer period of time.
The paper compares data from our 2015, 2018 and 2019 Down to Earth surveys while also linking changes in public opinion to the media coverage on climate change.
In an article for the German journal “Media Perspektiven”, we analysed our survey data from 2015 and 2018, focusing on media use and evaluation of the coverage related to the topic of climate change and climate politics. The article is available here (open access, German only).
In einem Artikel für die Fachzeitschrift “Media Perspektiven” haben wir unsere Befragungsdaten aus 2015 und 2018 im Hinblick auf die Nutzung und Bewertung klimapolitischer Medieninhalte ausgewertet. Der Artikel ist hier online zugänglich.
“How can contemporary image makers promote new thinking and make a difference in the world?” (Fred Ritchin, Bending the frame)
Since the first day in my photo journalism class, taught by Sarah Schorr at Aarhus University, Ritchin’s quote has not lost its grip on me. How can a single photo in today’s digital media flow, still contribute towards making a change? How can one create meaningful content through a photo project?
Questions, which constantly floated in my head. Thoughts permanently popped up and disappeared again.
Continue reading A change in mind (Photo journalism project as a support for #EarthToParis)
From the beginning of journalism, proximity has worked as one of the main news values or criteria for selecting interesting events. This principle was later formulated in the classic handbook written by Karl Warren, for whom the most interesting thing for any human being is himself/ herself and, afterwards, what is closest –eg. family, friends, home or work.
However, the media have often represented climate change as a remote process, with little or no influence in people’s lives. It may come as no surprise that many European citizens think that it is currently affecting only some remote regions of the planet, like the poles -“Okay, ice is melting, but this is not going to change my life in the near future.”
Since the official start of our CliSAP idea contest project in April, the CRG ‘Media Constructions of Climate Change’ has reached many important interim goals. A sample of online news media was assembled, currently covering 23 countries worldwide. It includes well-known media outlets like the American and international edition of the New York Times (USA), but also titles such as Jakarta Globe (Indonesia), Excelsior (Mexico) or Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) – in total there are currently 42 media outlets included. Important criteria for the selection of the media were (1) the coverage, (2) the daily publication and (3) the national / supra-regional importance of reporting. The media sample is supplemented by an analysis of the climate discourses on Twitter.
Since July, ICDC has started the technical implementation of the tools. The online media monitor (OMM) is supposed to automatically store, analyze, aggregate, and visualize data obtained from global climate media reports, with results visible and usable for everyone. For this purpose, a program is currently being developed that extracts articles based on RSS feeds and exports them to a database. Afterwards, the implementation and visualization of the data analysis will be carried out. In the last phase of the project, automated content analysis functionality will be added to the tools in order to detect, for example, subjects or actors (such as countries, organizations, or particular scientists), and to visualize their activities.
CliSAP researchers at CEN shall be provided with the opportunity for further analysis of the data from the media monitor.
Continue reading Monitoring the Daily Climate Debate Online – Mid-term report