Reporting climate change stories sometimes seems dauntingly difficult. But it’s mainly straightforward for any enthusiastic reporter. Alex Kirby, former BBC environment correspondent, offers a few tips.

Basics

• First, last and throughout the story – think READER!
• The editor matters – if you want to keep your job. So write to length and to time.
• Think of the one thing you are going to tell your reader, think of a short and snappy headline which fits the story, then write to it.
• Check your copy before handing it in. If you don’t bother to get the small things right, why should your reader trust you to be right about really important things?
• Write short sentences – they are much easier to understand.
  Write stories which tell the reader as much as they need to know to understand you, but no more. Less is often more in journalism.
• Please do not use capital letters as a form of decoration. They have a purpose: make sure you understand it. Use punctuation properly. If you are not sure what a word means, find out before you use it – or else don’t use it.
• Remember the newsroom rule: tell the reader WHAT has happened, WHERE, WHEN, HOW and WHY. Tell them WHO made it happen, to WHOM it happened – and HOW MUCH the whole thing will cost. And tell them in an understandable sequence.
• Please do NOT cut-and-paste more than a few words from another source. Even then, you should turn the material into your own words. Journalism is about writing, not about stealing someone else’s work. And there’s copyright to remember as well.
• Make sure you understand your story properly (so make sure you understand what your interviewees tell you).
• When you have finished writing, read your story through. Then read it again. Then ask a friend or colleague to read it. Then read it again yourself. Correct and shorten it. Only then should you give it to the subs or the news editor.

A bit less basic

• Find a good intro. If you don’t, you are wasting a chance to attract readers.
• Remember that you control your material, not the other way round. You do not have to include everything you have learnt, and you should not. But remember that sometimes you can and should add to the material you have acquired. Tell the reader enough for them to understand the story, no more and no less.
• So provide context. Give the reader the extra facts they need to understand the story thoroughly.
• But don’t leave out facts just because they are inconvenient. Within your word count you must make sure you are accurate, impartial and fair.
• Your job is to tell your reader a story, not just a jumble of unconnected facts. SciDev.Net describes the process: “A well-written story is not simply a list of facts – it should follow a clear thread, making it obvious to the reader why one paragraph follows the next.”
• Write in plain language, and write about people who can illustrate your story. Paint pictures with words. Use your powers of description to tell the reader about people, places and incidents – what the newsroom calls “colour”.
• Check your facts. If you state something is a fact, you had better be sure it really is. If you are not certain, leave it out.
• If you are writing for a website, make sure you get your main points near the top of the story. Remember you are writing for a worldwide readership, so be careful not to write about things they will know nothing about.
• Be sceptical. Don’t believe anyone till they have given you evidence to support what they say. Many people want to use us as megaphones to spread their version of the facts quite uncritically. Don’t let them.
  Remember how important details are, and make sure you get them right.
• Find a good conclusion which perhaps throws the story forward or encourages the reader to find out more, or to do something. Then stop writing. Then sub yourself to length.

Writing about climate change

• The climate change story is complex. Make sure you help your reader through it by explaining everything you write about. Mitigation, adaptation and REDD will not mean much to most people without an explanation from you. When you are reading your story through, ask yourself what – if anything – your reader will understand by every word you have written.
• It’s a story about science – and about health, and energy, and food, and water, and the economy, and all sorts of things that matter to readers. So tell them about climate change through subjects they are already interested in.
• The world faces several crises at once – hunger, thirst, loss of species, pollution, population growth and others. Remember two things about climate change which will help people to understand why it is so serious: it is going to make all the other problems worse and harder to solve; and the pace at which the climate is changing is perhaps more worrying than the simple fact that it is changing at all.
• Make sure you understand – and explain to your reader – the difference between weather and climate.
• Be careful when describing risk. Try to give the reader an idea of the likelihood that something will happen, as well as the possibility that it could.
• Don’t let editors talk you into horror headlines if the facts don’t justify them.
• You cannot always be balanced, and sometimes you should not even try to be. It is not our job to try to provide balance where none exists. But we can and should always try to be fair (see Panos London’s editorial guidelines).
• Writers about climate change tread a narrow line. We have to explain that solutions exist, so the world can solve the problem – but also that the situation is urgent, so only really radical change can provide an answer. One British scientist, Sir David King, said of reducing greenhouse gas emissions: “It is do-able. But we are going to have to bust a gut to do it.” A scientist in Africa said: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Here in Africa, it’s too late to be pessimistic.” And the 19th century Italian writer Antonio Gramsci urged: “Pessimism of the intellect – optimism of the will.”