Good morning, I'd like to start this thread on why I made MicroClimates with this screenshot from a New Yorker article about an environmental reporter at the Louisville Courier-Journal that has been burning a hole into my brain for over a year

At first, the thing that bothered me was that last statement: why wasn’t the reach the same at all? But looking back at it, it’s not about perception of the platform’s reach , it’s about the locality and immediacy of the coverage.

InsideClimate News might cover something in Kentucky occasionally but even if it’s a big splash, it’s not their “people”, the reporter is not necessarily going to keep following up. That’s what local news organizations have the geographic focus and knowledge to do.

@sfchronicle is in a rare position: A regional newspaper that's not being cut back. A newsroom operating on as many cylinders as we can spare. I don’t think we hide the fact that we want to help replicate what's working here. I think that includes how we cover climate change.

But like we’ve done with the rest of our coverage, we have to rethink HOW we do so. I'm an immensely practical person, so I look at beautifully done climate journalism, and I think, wow I'm glad you did this but okay, now what? Who is this for?

We're in a news landscape that's more nationalized, but for people not plugged into climate news, debates over lowering emissions and adapting are going to arrive as changes to daily life, consumer preferences, local city council meetings, the state's policies on how it spends

Aka the bread and butter of a local news organization.

@sfchronicle has already done a lot of this, but MicroClimates lets me put it all in context, in one place, and helps us experiment.

Basically I took @audreyhasnews' motto: "Earn new readers. Save the world" way too literally. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/MicroClimates-The-story-of-the-century-15512125.php .