Covering Climate Now (CCNow)

Global · co-founded at Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation · Executive Director: Mark Hertsgaard

Overview

Covering Climate Now (CCNow) is a global journalism collaboration co-founded in April 2019 by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope — at the time, respectively, the environment correspondent of The Nation and the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review — to address what they characterized as a chronic and dangerous gap between the scale of the climate crisis and the scale of journalism's coverage of it. Hertsgaard's founding essay at CJR was titled "The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns." The proposition was simple and urgent: the media were covering the most consequential story of the era as if it were a routine beat rather than a civilizational emergency, and the gap between the urgency of the science and the volume and prominence of journalism about it was itself a form of public misinformation by omission.

In the six years since its founding, CCNow has grown from a project involving roughly 60 initial partner outlets to a collaboration of more than 500 news organizations from more than 60 countries, with a combined audience exceeding 2 billion people. Partners range from the three largest global wire services — Reuters, Bloomberg, and Agence France-Presse — to CBS News, NBC and MSNBC, PBS NewsHour, Univision, Noticias Telemundo, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, TIME, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Nature, and hundreds of local newspapers, public radio stations, newsletters, and independent digital outlets. CCNow describes its founding conviction plainly: "more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution."

Founding: Bill Moyers, a Week of Coverage, and a Permanent Collaboration

The launch of CCNow in the spring of 2019 was accompanied by a challenge to the media world: join a coordinated week of intensive climate coverage timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York in September 2019. More than 250 media organizations committed, producing an unprecedented coordinated week of climate journalism — what CCNow and CJR described as "one of the most ambitious efforts ever to organize the world's media around a single coverage topic." The week ran from September 16 to 23, 2019. Bill Moyers, the veteran broadcast journalist, spoke at the launch and challenged journalists to "tell the story so people get it."

The founding logic was not that a one-time week of coverage would solve the problem. It was that the week would demonstrate the appetite for climate journalism that existed in newsrooms that had been paralyzed by uncertainty about audience interest, and that the relationships formed during the coordinated week could become the foundation of a permanent collaboration that moved the entire journalism ecosystem. That proved to be correct: the September 2019 week generated an estimated 1 billion-plus audience impressions and persuaded hundreds of newsrooms that their readers and viewers wanted more climate coverage than they were getting. CCNow formally established itself as a permanent organization after the week's success.

Co-Founders: Hertsgaard and Pope

Mark Hertsgaard has covered climate change since 1989 — reporting from 25 countries, writing about the issue for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, Scientific American, the Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, and publishing it as the central subject of two books: Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future (1998) and HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011). He is the environment correspondent of The Nation, a position he held both before and through CCNow's founding, and serves as CCNow's executive director. His personal engagement with climate journalism predates the founding of CCNow by three decades, giving him an unusual perspective on the evolution of the media's treatment of the story — from the early period when climate was a science story, through its emergence as a policy story, to the current moment when it is becoming a story about every beat simultaneously.

Kyle Pope served as editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review from 2016 until October 2023, when he left to join CCNow full time as Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives — a decision he described as driven by the conviction that "journalism still isn't devoting enough attention to the climate crisis" and that the moment demanded full-time commitment to changing that. Pope's seven-year tenure at CJR had won multiple industry awards and solidified the publication's standing as the leading source of journalism industry analysis. At CCNow, he had served as board chair before becoming a full-time staff member, and had chaired the annual Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards since their founding.

What CCNow Offers Partners

CCNow asks its partner newsrooms to commit to treating the climate crisis as the emergency it is — building toward an all-of-newsroom strategy in which climate is not siloed in a single beat or a single reporter but is integrated across politics, weather, business, culture, and local news coverage. In exchange, it provides a range of support services, most available exclusively to partners. Customized training for journalists and newsroom executives covers the science of climate attribution (how to determine whether an extreme weather event can be linked to climate change), the economics of the energy transition, solution-focused journalism methodology, and how to cover climate in ways that engage rather than numb audiences. The Sharing Library provides a curated archive of partner-produced climate content available for republication, enabling smaller newsrooms without dedicated climate reporters to draw on the work of larger partners. A Slack community connects the global network of CCNow journalists for peer learning, source-sharing, and collaborative story development. CCNow also hosts conferences — including an annual event during Climate Week NYC at Columbia University — where journalists share best practices and develop collaborative coverage plans.

One particularly consequential strand of CCNow's training work targets local television meteorologists — a large and underutilized population of communicators who reach local audiences daily with weather information but have historically avoided making the connection between specific weather events and the climate patterns driving them. CCNow has worked systematically to equip meteorologists with the scientific literacy and communicative confidence to make the climate connection in their weather reporting — a project that addresses one of the most significant gaps in public understanding of the issue.

The 2026 White Paper: Coverage Declining Despite Public Demand

In May 2026 CCNow published a white paper titled "A Burning House, A Quiet Media, A Silenced Majority" — based on conversations with more than 30 journalists across global newsrooms — that documented a stark and troubling divergence between climate journalism supply and public demand. Global climate coverage dropped 14% in 2025. US broadcast airtime on climate fell by approximately one-third. Dedicated climate teams were cut across major outlets. Meanwhile, public concern remained consistently high: 80 to 89% of people globally told pollsters they wanted stronger climate action. The paper characterized the divergence as a structural failure of the media ecosystem — not a failure of public interest but a failure of journalistic prioritization in the face of newsroom budget pressures, attention competition from other major story cycles (the second Trump administration's domestic agenda in particular), and institutional inertia.

The white paper's title captures the founding paradox of CCNow's existence: a burning house (the climate emergency) being covered by a quiet media while a majority who are not silent about their concerns (the public) remain effectively silenced by the absence of the journalism that would translate those concerns into public pressure and democratic action. The document is consistent with the organization's founding argument, now borne out by six years of data: the gap between the story and the coverage has not closed and may be widening.

Editorial Independence and Membership Requirements

CCNow is explicit about the conditions for partnership: all member organizations must be editorially independent, non-partisan, non-governmental, and not involved in advocacy or activism. The distinction is meaningful — CCNow's founders have argued consistently that the value of journalism in addressing the climate crisis depends on its credibility as independent reporting, not as advocacy, and that journalists covering climate should approach the story with the same standards of verification, accountability, and skepticism they would apply to any other major institutional failure. CCNow does not require partners to adopt any particular editorial position on climate policy; it requires them to cover climate science accurately and to give the story the prominence the science warrants.

Individual journalists, as well as news organizations, are welcome to join CCNow's community. The InfluenceWatch characterization of CCNow as advancing a partisan agenda reflects a view that treating climate science as established fact is itself ideological. CCNow's position is that treating established scientific consensus as one side of a debate is the ideological act.

Access and Partnership

Journalists and news organizations can apply to join CCNow as partners at coveringclimatenow.org/join. The weekly ClimateBeat newsletter — which highlights best practices, noteworthy stories, and job opportunities — is available to subscribers at coveringclimatenow.org/newsletter. The annual Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards are open to submissions through the awards page; the 2024 awards were announced in July 2024, and submissions for the following year's awards open in early 2025. All CCNow publications, resources, and the partner Sharing Library are described at coveringclimatenow.org. For media inquiries: editors@coveringclimatenow.org. To support CCNow financially: mark@coveringclimatenow.org or the donate page on the website.