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Journalism

At its best, AI can help us to reflect on our humanity. At its worst, it can lead us to forget it

Frankenstein's monster and Maria

Almost all conversations around AI come down to these hopes and fears: that at its best AI can help us to reflect on our humanity. At its worst, it can lead us to forget it — or subjugate it.

When AI is dismissed as flawed, it is often through a concern that it will make us less human — or redundant.

The problem with this approach is that it can overlook the very real problems, and risks, in being human.

When people talk about the opportunities in using AI, it is often because they hope it will address the very human qualities of ignorance, bias, human error — or simply lack of time.

The problem with this approach is that it overlooks the very real problems, and risks, in removing tasks from a human workflow, including deskilling and job satisfaction.

So every debate on the technology should come back to this question: are we applying it (or dismissing it) in a way that leads us to ignore our humanity — or in a way that forces us to address our very human strengths and weaknesses?

Climate

Covering Deforestation

Story Spark: Deforestation

In 2024, nearly 8.1 million hectares of forest were permanently lost around the world — an area roughly half the size of England. Though annual deforestation rates have almost halved since 1990, experts say the world is far off track to meet a target pledged four years ago during COP26 to halt and reverse global deforestation by 2030. 

Deforestation is both a global story and a local one — while 95% of deforestation occurs in the tropics, everyday products, such as beef, avocados, coffee, palm oil, paper, and even beauty products like collagen are produced on deforested land. Investigating these links helps your audience see the impacts in their daily lives, and brings a story that originates thousands of miles away closer to home. 

Historically, agriculture has been the primary driver of deforestation, accounting for about 86% of global deforestation over the past decade. The climate impacts of this land-use change are vast: Removing forests both releases their stored carbon into the atmosphere and eliminates their capacity to store carbon in the future. While some reforestation programs have been successful, with many countries now gaining more forest than they’ve lost in the past decade, scientists say that halting deforestation of old-growth forests, which are even more productive than younger forests at storing carbon, is critical.

In addition to land-use changes, which account for 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s forests are increasingly at risk of other climate change–driven risks, including wildfires, extreme weather, and pests. Last year, a surge of fires, which were made more likely and intense due to climate change, caused extensive devastation to forests around the world, and made fire the leading driver of tropical forest loss for the first time. Warming temperatures have also fueled the expansion of pine and spruce beetles with unprecedented deaths of trees in forests across the Northern Hemisphere.

Stories We Like

  • Recent US tariffs on China may “turbocharge deforestation” in the Amazon by driving up soybean production in Brazil, The Atlantic reports.
  • Climate change threatens more than just tropical rainforests, as pests, wildfires, and changing precipitation patterns put the world’s boreal forests at risk. Canada’s CBC News reports.
  • Nearly one-third of avocados consumed worldwide are grown in Michoacán, Mexico. Grist highlights how global culinary demands are driving deforestation in the country’s “Avocado Belt” and explores ways some producers are growing more ethical, eco-friendly fruits. 
  • Wildfires are a growing threat to the world’s forests; in 2024, fire was the principal driver of tropical forest loss for the first time. DW reports how climate change fueled last year’s “fire pandemic” in Brazil. 
  • In Colombia, ranchers are testing out “cow hotels” to reduce deforestation in South America, reports NPR. Clearing land for cattle is the single biggest driver of rainforest loss in the Amazon. 
  • Blue Dot Living highlights how Indigenous groups are fighting to protect Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the world’s largest temperate rainforests — and most significant carbon sinks. 

Resources

Experts

  • Mary Gagen, geography professor, Swansea University
  • Erin Matson, lead consultant, Climate Focus
  • Matthew Hansen, remote sensing scientist, University of Maryland
  • Lisa Rausch, associate professor, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Before We Go…

Want more story ideas? Check out the Locally Sourced archive for more topics to explore, including resilient agriculture, emergency alerts, climate anxiety, and more.

Know someone who might be interested in this newsletter? Forward Locally Sourced to a colleague!

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The post Covering Deforestation appeared first on Covering Climate Now.

Climate

Technology Neutrality Is Not The Solution To The Car Industry’s Issues

If the EU holds firm on the 2035 target, the European auto industry has a real chance to be competitive global EV players. Next week the EU will make an announcement that will decide the fate of its car industry. The revision of the car CO2 law, and the 2035 electrification ... [continued]

The post Technology Neutrality Is Not The Solution To The Car Industry’s Issues appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Making ETS2 Work

Measures to keep ETS2 prices affordable. Weakening the car CO2 standards will only make the ETS2 more expensive. Here’s why: The Council and the European Parliament agreed to delay ETS2 by one year. Before the prospect of an ETS2 delay emerged, 2027 carbon price projections under the MSR reform ranged ... [continued]

The post Making ETS2 Work appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Dragonfly Energy Expands Marine OEM Footprint with World’s Largest Power Catamaran Manufacturer, World Cat

Reno, Nevada — Dragonfly Energy Holdings Corp. (Nasdaq: DFLI) (“Dragonfly Energy” or the “Company”), an industry leader in energy storage and maker of Battle Born Batteries®, today announced that World Cat, the world’s largest producer of power catamarans, has expanded its integration of Battle Born® power systems across new models. Following the ... [continued]

The post Dragonfly Energy Expands Marine OEM Footprint with World’s Largest Power Catamaran Manufacturer, World Cat appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

ICYMI: Indianapolis Billboard Calls Out Coal for Hoosiers’ High Utility Bills

Indianapolis, Indiana — A new ad in downtown Indianapolis reminds Hoosiers that their high utility bills are thanks to coal. According to a new report, Indiana is the state with the highest year-over-year electric bills, as bills have increased more than 16% in the last year, and Indiana’s energy prices have ... [continued]

The post ICYMI: Indianapolis Billboard Calls Out Coal for Hoosiers’ High Utility Bills appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Climate

Where the Ocean and Atmosphere Communicate

Where the Ocean and Atmosphere Communicate MIT Spectrum
MIT Spectrum
Topics
Atmosphere
Climate Modeling
Oceans
Weather & Natural Disasters
PostDecember 8, 2025

Where the Ocean and Atmosphere Communicate

Photo Credit
Courtesy of Abigail Bodner
Global map showing kilometer-scale ocean turbulence that mix water masses and transport heat, energy, and nutrients.

By Mark Sullivan

From a computer-lined office in the Green Building on MIT’s campus, climate scientist Abigail Bodner monitors the world’s oceans, bringing a mathematician’s eye to gauging interactions between wind and wave.

“I am fascinated by the way mathematics can describe fluid motion,” says Bodner, a self-described “desk oceanographer” who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. She holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which is housed jointly in the college and the School of Engineering.

Through her research into localized ocean turbulence and its impact on climate patterns, she seeks to improve larger-scale climate models, leading to better projections of long-term changes, such as sea-level rise, that are important to coastal communities.

Applying math and theory to natural phenomena

Bodner uses AI tools, satellite imagery, and data from idealized and more realistic simulations in her studies of complex ocean-atmosphere interactions.

“I was interested in math and earth sciences and ended up focusing on fluid dynamics, which combines the best of both worlds,” she said. “It’s a way we can explain natural phenomena with equations and physics. I got excited by the possibility of being able to see something and then write down this super complex mathematical form.

“More recently, I’ve started using computational tools, including different types of model simulations. AI is emerging in ocean observation products. It has been interesting to be able to combine computational tools and theory together with explaining natural phenomena and their impact.”

Bodner came to MIT in 2024, previously having been a Simons Junior Fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. She received her BS in geophysics and mathematics and MS in geophysics from Tel Aviv University, and her SM in applied mathematics and PhD in earth, environmental, and planetary sciences from Brown University.

She cofounded and directs an online summer program, Climatematch Academy, that has trained thousands of users from diverse backgrounds around the world to engage climate challenges using cutting-edge techniques.

“I am passionate about teaching and am especially motivated to teach computational tools for climate science,” said Bodner. “I believe it is critical that the future generation of scientists are properly trained to use the wealth of climate data and tools available on open-source platforms.”

Monitoring the interaction of ocean and atmosphere on a local scale

Her research focuses on the role of turbulence in the upper, or topmost, layer of the ocean, where the exchange of heat and energy with the atmosphere occurs, playing a significant role in global climate regulation.

“The ocean and the atmosphere communicate through that upper layer through turbulence,” she said. “It’s an interesting mathematical and physical problem, too small to capture from theories we’ve developed for large-scale ocean circulation, but too big to be captured in a tank or classroom experiment. Beyond the theoretical mathematical perspective, this hyperlocal phenomenon can impact the global climate.”

Global models are used in long-term projections of changes in sea surface temperatures, in rising sea levels, and in “what our climate system is going to be doing over the next hundred years,” she says. But the grid used in the global model doesn’t resolve a particular geographic locality such as Boston, which occupies a mere pixel or grid point in the model.

“Any kind of local effects we need to plan for over the next few decades are going to be informed by this coarse model,” she observes. “And then the question is, do we have the right information? Improving our understanding of what happens on a smaller scale, on the order of one kilometer or less, will better inform long-term projections on the larger scale.”

Uncategorized

Your Job Was Stopping CSAM? Trump Says No Visa For You!

You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they’re doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust & safety, fact checking, content moderation, or mis- or disinformation research. The government is now punishing people for speech—specifically, punishing them for the false belief that their work constitutes censorship.

The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants – and family members who would be traveling with them – to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” under a specific article of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the cable said.

It’s like JD Vance’s “the rules were you weren’t going to fact check me” taken to a new level.

This policy censors non-censors for not doing the thing that the White House and MAGA folks are actively doing every day. MAGA knows content moderation is necessary—they’re super eager to have it applied when it’s speech they don’t like. As we’ve recently discussed, they’ve suddenly been demanding social media companies stop foreign influence campaigns and remove anything mean about Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the White House itself is engaged in a twisted version of what it claims is fact checking and demanding that media orgs hire MAGA-friendly censors.

The hypocrisy is the point. But it’s also blatantly unconstitutional. As Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to this news:

People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren’t engaged in ‘censorship’— they’re engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional.

Incoherent and unconstitutional is being too kind.

The real work that trust & safety professionals do makes this policy even more perverse. As trust & safety expert (and occasional Ctrl-Alt-Speech guest host) Alice Hunsberger told (the recently defunded) NPR:

“Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it,” she said. “Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it’s so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer.”

So the administration is now barring entry to people whose work includes stopping child sexual abuse material and protecting Americans from foreign bad actors—all while claiming to oppose censorship and demanding platforms remove content about Charlie Kirk. The only way this makes sense is if you understand what the actual principle at work is: we get to control all speech, and anyone who might interfere with that control must be punished.

There are no fundamental values at work here beyond “we have power, and we’re going to abuse it to silence anyone who stands in our way.”

Climate

Is The Plant-Based Food Sector Really Too Woke?

Was the plant-based meat substitute industry wrong to recommend its products as a climate solution? That’s what Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness insists, saying that the approach severely restricted the company’s potential customer base early on. The approach may have contributed to an inevitable pattern of steadily falling US faux ... [continued]

The post Is The Plant-Based Food Sector Really Too Woke? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Journalism, News-tech

Playing in Traffic

And it's just f'ing dumb

Henry Farrell: America has identified its greatest enemy: Western Europe. It's not a fight the EU wanted or imagined before this year. But it's here. Being based in the US is now a disadvantage for forming partnerships with entities in the EU.

I speak from experience. MyTerms is a project run by Customer Commons, a US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit. Prior to the change of government in the US., one could operate something with worldwide scope from here. Now we need to base most of our MyTerms work in the EU. That's actually a good thing, strategically, because Europe gives a much larger shit about privacy than the US generally (thank WWII and the Holocaust), and that's where most of the interest in MyTerms is spinning up. But it is a huge downer to hear from friends and co-workers elsewhere that one reason we need to make the move is that the US government is hostile to the EU and the rest of the world. (It doesn't matter that there are arguments against that assertion. Logic and reason may sit on the mental board of directors, but emotions cast the deciding votes. And this is an emotional matter now.)

And yes, things are worse

Most of my traffic yesterday came from this post by troubled engineer, who linked to this post of mine from more than ten years ago.

And if that ain't racist, what is?

National parks fee-free calendar drops MLK Day, Juneteenth and adds Trump's birthday.

Journalism

Big Tech’s economic takeover can be beat

The same internet that gives rise to the dystopian narrative has tools to prevent disaster

Don Marti is a strategist in web ecosystem and open source business issues. He is an invited expert for the Privacy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has written or edited for several internet-related publications. 

Big Tech’s ongoing project to crush independent journalism is a small part of a larger, more ambitious narrative, in which the market economy as we know it is replaced by, in effect, economic central planning enabled by “AI.” The so-called Torment Nexus, where, as Hugo-award-winning author Charles Stross writes, a few oligarchs control “state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized,” is a dismal vision of the future.

But even as academics, journalists, and whistleblowers wear out their carpal tunnels documenting Big Tech’s multifarious villainy, the flow of money and customer data to the same companies continues. The book Careless People exposes Meta’s role in promoting genocide and government censorship, but the Careless People page on the publisher site has a Meta Pixel on it. In the previous column in this series, I covered Big Tech’s vision for the economy — a new system, rapidly being realized, where anyone who wants to sell anything sends money and personal data to a few centralized platforms, and gets transactions out — while most of the profits are captured by the platforms, and negative externalities like a mental health crisis and pervasive scams fall on everyone else.

Bringing existential threats down to mere problems

But, to look on the bright side for a minute, this is just an internet dystopia narrative. And the internet turns out to be remarkably good at beating those. We don’t eliminate them entirely, but we take them down from civilization-ending risks to merely ongoing problems that flare up into the occasional crisis. The common thread of any internet dystopia narrative is:

  • Powerful adversary with a goal of centralized control;
  • Some internet activity where rules favor centralization;
  • Consensus that centralization is inevitable.

The best-known dystopia stories have a catchy “chip” name.  Cryptography backdoor dystopia started out with a U.S. government plan to use a key escrow system together with export controls, implemented on a “Clipper Chip” with a back door. Today, end-to-end encryption is built into so many essential processes that it would be impractical to roll back. Risks to confidential communications keep coming up — Chat Control in the EU is the latest, and worthy of attention — but it’s an issue to keep on top of and not the end of the internet. Another dystopia, Digital Rights Management (DRM) mandate, would have put a “Fritz chip” in all devices that could copy digital information, giving some DRM vendor or cartel control of everything. Today, DRM is still a lock-in problem for many products, and limits how much repair work an independent service can do for you, but it’s an issue that’s being debated one product or format at a time.

Marketers are understanding the risks 

Maybe something inherent in the internet’s design causes a dystopia narrative to emerge every so often. The good news for the prospects of beating this one is that marketers are already seeing the risks I covered last time, and looking for alternatives. The Google/Meta duopoly, as growth stocks, must grow at a greater rate than the economy as a whole, which means, on average, taking a bigger piece of every transaction.  “If Google and Facebook ads are the only way for you to reach customers you don’t have a viable business,” Nandini Jammi, a brand consultant and founder of the new firm LTR Partners, told me. “When you build your entire strategy around Facebook or Google ads, it’s like an anti-investment, it’s a dependency on these tools that distract you from building meaningful, sustainable brands.”

In theory, marketers know that marketing benefits from impact and breaking through clutter, but in practice the ad agency BBH found that ”group cohesion” among marketers is the highest for all occupations they studied. High cohesion leads to similar decisions by all members of the group, and today, marketing conventional wisdom treats Big Tech spending as required. But as companies are forced to cut back on quality and service because surveillance advertising captures a larger and larger fraction of every sale, the Wall Street Journal reports that American Customers Are Madder Than Ever. “AI” is not helping. According to AI strategist Anna Blender,  “people rate content suspected of being AI-generated as much worse across metrics like trust and authenticity.” In Australia, “AI slop” is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. Naturally the opportunities for brands to brag on “human-made” work and try to appeal to Anti-AI “haters” abound.

High tech answers

But the choice to break out of Big Tech value extraction can go in a high-tech direction too. Rick Bruner, CEO of the advertising measurement company Central Control, argues for ”high-quality, randomized controlled trials” to measure ad campaigns — a more trustworthy approach to measurement than throwing money and data at Google and Meta and taking their word for the results. He writes,

Statistical models, including synthetic users, artificial intelligence, machine learning, attribution, all manner of quasi-experiments and other observational methods are faster, more expensive and less transparent forms of correlation — not measurement of causation. They may be effective for audience targeting, but they are not for quantifying ROI. 

As a result of one “rigorous” trial, Netflix eliminated paid search advertising — the kind of decision that can free up significant money for ad-supported news. That will take some work from the publisher side, since, Bruner suggests, “publishers seem unwilling to make the necessary targeting reforms to make them a viable experimental unit to fix the morass of digital advertising measurement.” Moving ad budgets to news is an opportunity for legit ad-supported media that can meet the needs of marketers who know more math than Big Tech wants them to.

Social media is another opportunity for improvement. “Social” doesn’t have to mean dumping people’s data into an ML black box and running the same boring AI slop ads as everyone else. Some of the most powerful social investments are in real-world events that result in content and impact online. In a flood of over-optimized, look-alike mobile game advertising, the game development firm Wargaming.net keeps up a sponsor relationship with The Tank Museum in Bovington, England — a place that most players won’t attend physically, but that acts as a sort of hall of fame for content creators who cover the vehicles players can operate in the games. Buying surveillance ads is renting eyeballs, but in the case of Wargaming, the game company, content creators, and museum have a feedback loop that builds reputation they get to keep. Direct-to-consumer brands are selling through Von Maur, a mall department store, to capture a similar effect.

Marketing decision-makers read the news like the rest of us, and can’t help hearing that Facebook makes 10% of their revenue from scams and ads for banned items, the FBI warns about the security risks of search ads to the end user, and new documents show that Meta buried evidence of the mental health harms they inflict on teenaged users. Marketers want to do the right thing, but as we have seen with previous dystopia threats, sometimes the people affected by a dystopia need a swift kick to get together and fight it. A final bright spot that may provide that swift kick is recent legal cases over the California Invasion of Privacy Act, Video Privacy Protection Act, and other privacy-related laws that may not have been written for the internet but create just enough legal risk for marketers to push them over the line to do the right thing. The good news is group cohesion. Breaking out of surveillance dystopia is good for business, the right thing to do for others, and — with the legal news to point to for justification — the safe, prudent course of action, too.

Next: News companies and organizations, when participating in policy debates, are missing out on opportunities to better represent their own interests, the national interest, and the interests of legitimate businesses. Instead they are acting as sock puppets for Big Tech and advocating for surveillance. How can the news business do better?

Cite this article

Marti, Don  (2025, Dec. 8). Big Tech’s economic takeover can be beat. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/big-techs-economic-takeover-can-be-beat/

Journalism

No, the explainer isn’t dead. It just needs a reason to live.

A collection of explainer headlines

Marie Gilot says the explainer is dead. Because AI.

“Today, our readers query AI for all that stuff,” she writes. “They like the AI answers well enough and they don’t click on article links.”

Here’s the type of content losing to AI: explainers, how-tos, evergreens, aggregated news, resource lists, hours of operation for government offices, recipes.

Gilot is right, of course. But only partly.

It’s right that the commercial imperative to produce explainers — low cost, high traffic — is going to come under severe challenge at one end.

But that doesn’t mean the explainer is dead. It just means they need to have a reason to fight for their life beyond money.

A reason for explainers to live

And one of those reasons? Because AI.

When Hilke Schellmann tested AI tools’ performance on journalistic research tasks in August, she concluded that their inconsistency raised “concerns about how these tools define relevance or importance in a field.

“If [someone] relies on these tools to understand the context surrounding new research, they risk misunderstanding and misrepresenting [new information], omitting published critiques, and overlooking prior work that challenges the findings.”

Abandoning this territory to the large language models is like saying we shouldn’t do product reviews because content creators are doing it already for their very generous sponsors (or cover politics. Or sport. Etc).

Carefully curated explainers might not boost the ego of a reporter who sees themselves as a dogged news hound, but we should probably still be writing them to serve audiences and compete with AI-generated alternatives — especially given their propensity to repeat false claims.

It is particularly the case if we are have any mission to give a voice to the voiceless — by definition underrepresented in AI training data.

There remain some commercial arguments in explainers’ favour, too. They retain a useful function in improving metrics such as bounce rates: if a reader has a question about some element of a story, and it links to an explainer answering that, they don’t even have to leave the site to bother asking AI.

If readers discover that they enjoy the creativity, freshness, rigour or wit of your explainers in a way that they don’t warm to the dryness, verbosity, sycophancy or gullibility of AI, they may be more likely to keep coming back.

Explainers can play an important role in reaching new audiences post-search too, on video platforms like TikTok and Instagram where users may stumble across your content without necessarily looking for it.

And then there’s the unmeasured value of branding and trust: a well-designed explainer can signal to an audience that we are interested in solving their problems and answering their questions, rather than just telling their stories.

Climate

The Guardian view on solar geoengineering: Africa has a point about this risky technology | Editorial

Sun-dimming risks putting the planet’s thermostat under Donald Trump’s control. Better to adopt the precautionary principle with high-stakes science

It is fitting that this week’s UN environment talks are in Nairobi, with Africa shaping the global climate conversation. The continent’s diplomats are dealing with the vexed question of whether it is wise to try to cool the planet by dimming the sun’s rays. While not on the formal summit agenda, on the sidelines they are arguing that it’s time to stop promoting solar geoengineering technology as a solution to global heating. It’s hard to disagree.

African nations have acted because they don’t want their continent to become a test bed for unproven schemes to spray particles into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth for a small, uncertain cooling gain. They point to environmental, ethical and geopolitical risks. That’s why the continent is pushing for a global “non-use” agreement that would rule out public funding, outdoor experiments, patenting and official promotion of these technologies.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...
Uncategorized

Elon’s Crying Censorship Over An EU Fine That Has Nothing To Do With Censorship

Elon Musk is now calling for the dissolution of the European Union because it fined him $140 million for violating a law he once said was “exactly aligned” with his vision for (what was then called) Twitter.

And he’s doing it by lying about what the fine is actually for.

The EU hit X with a $140 million fine last week for violating the Digital Services Act (DSA). But (despite what you may have heard) this isn’t some censorship overreach by Brussels bureaucrats. The violations—which have been known for over a year—have nothing to do with content moderation. Zero. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying.

The fine is for three specific transparency failures: misleading users when Elon changed verification from actual verification to “pay $8 for a checkmark,” maintaining a broken ad repository, and refusing to share required data with researchers.

The European Union has announced a fine of $140 million against Elon Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, for several failures to comply with rules governing large digital platforms. A European Commission spokesperson said the fine against X’s holding company was due to the platform’s misleading use of a blue check mark to identify verified users, a poorly functioning advertising repository, and a failure to provide effective data access for researchers.

Again, let’s repeat: it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with the way X handles content moderation or what speech it allows on its platform. As Daphne Keller explains:

Don’t let anyone — not even the United States Secretary of State — tell you that the European Commission’s €120 million enforcement against Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Service Act (DSA) is about censorship or about what speech users can post on the platform. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this fine is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law. Many of these requirements resemble existing US laws or proposals that have garnered bipartisan support.

There are three charges against X, which all stem from a multi-year investigation that was launched in 2023. One is about verification — X’s blue checkmarks on user accounts — and two are about transparency. These charges have nothing to do with what content is on X, or what user speech the platform should or should not allow. There is plenty of EU political disapproval about those things, for sure. But the EU didn’t choose to pick a fight about them. Instead, it went after X for violating much more basic, straightforward provisions of the DSA. Those violations were flagrant enough that it would be weird if the EU hadn’t issued a fine.

Both Daphne and I have criticized attempts by EU officials to abuse the DSA in pursuit of censorship. I directly called it out when former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton clearly went way over the line last year, a move that quickly led to Breton losing his job. I’ve been highly critical of the DSA for years, so if this were actually an abuse of the law for censorship, I’d be first in line to call it out and side with Elon (I’ve done it in other circumstances as well).

But this is not that. This has nothing to do with “content moderation” or “censorship” in any way.

And yet, Elon Musk is running around pretending it is a free speech issue, and his once-again friends in the Trump administration are bolstering that false claim.

As Daphne pointed out, the EU could investigate certain aspects of X’s content moderation, and that could lead to serious questions about censorship and free speech. But they have not done so.

Honestly, this move is little different than the Trump FTC taking action against a Chinese company for violating COPPA. Which it has done. Did we see Chinese politicians lose their minds over that? Did we see the CEO of that company, Apitor Technology, call for dissolving the United States like Elon Musk is now calling for dissolving the EU? No. No, we did not.

But because the Elon Musks/JD Vances/Marco Rubios of the world can only think in terms of memes and culture wars, they know that if they just insist that this is about censorship, that the media will cover it that way, and the ignorant rabble on X will buy their version of the story.

All this is even more incredible because Elon Musk told the EU that he was entirely on board with the DSA while he was in the process of buying Twitter. Yes, the law he’s now claiming is censorship tyranny requiring the dissolution of an entire governmental body is the very same law he declared was “exactly aligned” with his vision for the platform.

At the time, we called out how the EU was clearly playing Musk, who seemed to have no clue what he was actually endorsing. It was obvious he hadn’t read or understood the DSA. But there he was, recording a video claiming perfect alignment with a regulatory framework he’s now treating as an existential threat to free speech.

So it’s pretty rich for him to whine about it now.

Of course, Musk isn’t just misrepresenting the fine. He’s responding with a series of escalating tantrums designed to feed his false censorship narrative. First, he called for abolishing the entire EU:

Then came the petty retaliation. First, he canceled the EU Commission’s X advertising account. X claimed it was because they “exploited” X’s ad platform by posting a link that appeared to be a video, but replies to that tweet suggested many, many people said that claimed “exploit” was not an exploit at all, but a tool that many others had used.

After that, Musk started threatening to punish EU Commissioners directly for the fine. In doing so he incorrectly references the Streisand Effect:

As the coiner of “The Streisand Effect,” I’d just like to point out that this is not what the Streisand Effect means at all.

Each move—calling to dissolve the EU, canceling ads, threatening individuals—is transparently designed to manufacture a free speech crisis where none exists. It’s performance art for an audience that won’t bother checking whether the fine is actually about censorship (it isn’t).

And he’ll likely keep escalating with the help of the Trump administration.

The DSA certainly has some issues, but this fine is not one of them. But that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk and his crew of political supporters from pretending that this is some huge attack on American free speech. It’s not. No more than the FTC’s fine against Apitor was an attack on China-based speech.

But, of course, most of the media will continue to pretend this is about free speech. They will frame it that way and for years into the future we’ll hear false stories—that the media and tons of other people will simply accept as true—that the EU fined X and Elon $140 million for not censoring people.

This is the template now. Violate fairly modest regulations, claim it’s censorship, get your political allies to amplify the lie, use it to de-legitimize any attempt at platform accountability for actively misleading users. It’s not about free speech. It never was. It’s about securing freedom from accountability while wielding the power of both private platforms and state resources to crush anyone who tries to impose it.

So yeah, anytime you hear someone claim the EU fined Musk for not censoring people, call it out. Because the truth matters, even when powerful people would prefer you didn’t notice they’re lying.

Journalism

Telling stories with data: more on the difference between ‘variation’ stories and ‘ranking’ angles

7 common angles for data storie: scale, change, ranking, variation, explore, relationships, bad data, leads
The 7 angles. Also available in Norwegian and Finnish.

One of the most common challenges I encounter when teaching people the 7 most common story angles in data journalism is confusion between variation and ranking stories. It all comes down to the difference between process and product.

That’s because both types of story involve ranking as a piece of data analysis.

We might rank the number of specialist teachers in the country’s schools, for example, in order to tell either of the following stories:

  • “There are more specialist science teachers than those in any other subject, new data reveals”
  • “New data reveals stark differences in the number of specialists teaching each subject in secondary schools

The first story reveals which subject has the most teachers — it is a ranking angle because it ranks teachers by subject.

The second story reveals the simple fact that variation exists, without focusing on any particular subject.

Here are some more examples (taken from the original post), with ranking angles shown on the left, and variation angles on the right. The linked angles are the stories that were published; the unlinked story angles show how an alternative angle might have been chosen for the same data.

RankingVariation
The part of Birmingham in top 10 UK areas worst-hit by Universal Credit advancesWelfare claimants hit by ‘postcode lottery’ of Universal Credit deductions
Construction is third most dangerous UK industryWide variation revealed in industry health and safety figures
The most common crimes in Sandwell – and where you’re most likely to be a victimSome areas of Sandwell seeing twice as many crimes as others
White defendants mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendantsThere’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.
Milton Keynes tops the list for electric vehicle charging pointsA “patchy” network of charging points is discouraging UK drivers from embracing electric cars, analysis suggests

Variation works best when fairness is expected or assumed

On the whole, ranking angles are a safer bet when it comes to data. This is because revealing who is top or bottom on a particular measure (or where your audience’s area ranks) is typically both more likely to be surprising, and more concrete.

A variation story only works if its existence is itself more important and surprising that the particular winners and losers.

So, for example, we wouldn’t tell a story revealing wide variation in how many goals teams score: we expect some teams to be better than others. But if we found wide variation in how many penalties referees award, that might be newsworthy. And it might be more important than which particular referees top the rankings on that metric.

Likewise, we wouldn’t ‘reveal’ that some people earn more than others. But a story on people earning more than others for doing the same job would be more unexpected (and ranking the top earners would not be nearly as interesting).

Journalism

Teaching a new generation of journalists AP Style

Stylebot is a tool that helps reach a digital generation right where they are — online

Stylebot is an app that offers a digital option for those of us trying to maintain standards and consistency in our work. For years, I’ve taught AP Style and had students whose work gets published at the Columbia Missourian, a community newspaper staffed by students at the Missouri School of Journalism. With a task of editing across the Missouri News Network’s five outlets (KBIA, KOMU 8, The Columbia Missourian, Vox Magazine and the Missouri Business Alert), the challenge of teaching AP Style has grown. Students struggle to memorize the rules and apply them to the different forms of writing from podcast scripts, radio episodes or news features. 

For us, it has perhaps been compounded as we’ve relied more on the online stylebook and our expectation of students knowing what to look up in it. Stylebot has helped our news outlets maintain consistency in our work while we teach a new generation of editors and producers.

This example is a syndicated column I was editing and used as a demo for my class to show them how Stylebot works
This example is a syndicated column I was editing and used as a demo for my class to show them how Stylebot works

Stylebot is trained on the most regularly used rules of AP Style — think about the stuff you’re using 90% of the time: titles, punctuation, capitalization, numerals. 

The app is not based on generative AI, so no hallucination of rules or answers. It’s actually based on the USC Annenberg School’s stylebook and closely mirrors AP rules. Users can also upload their own custom stylebooks for an additional cost. For our small team, the cost works out to about $5.50 per month per user. 

Stylebot pricing plans

The app works in tools many journalists are already using, such as Slack, Teams, Google’s Chrome browser — and now Google Docs, which is how we’re using it in our newsrooms. We chose to use Google Docs because not all our newsrooms use the same content management system and this seemed like the best way to implement it across our five outlets. 

A few months into our trial, we’ve found some success using Google Docs version of stylebot. It flags content for passive voice and marks a few things we might not have caught on a first read through a story. Students say they’re using it to double-check what they think they know from memory. One student said it could “save me from errors I might miss when I’m tired or rushing.”

The beauty of Stylebot is that it isn’t making any editorial decisions. It’s just telling us that there might be issues ahead. It’s up to editors to review what gets flagged or highlighted and then make the call. It also sends users back to stylebook entries for more guidance — so it’s like having a AP Style consultant right beside you as you read through content. 

One thing that will surely keep editors in business as we grapple with the role of Artificial Intelligence in our industry is understanding context. AI — and even Stylebot — doesn’t quite get nuance, so humans have to act on the content. It suggested I change “passed on” to died in a story about how legislation passed on straight party-line votes. 

This is an example of how Stylebot flags copy but doesn't understand that passed on is correct in this context
This is an example of how Stylebot flags copy but doesn’t understand that passed on is correct in this context

Using Stylebot has sped up the work of doing an initial read on content to check for style, which means student editors can now do more substantive editing, looking for holes and issues with structure. We’ve got a way to go in integrating it more fully across all our platforms — but getting editors to start looking up AP Style questions has been worth it.

Laura Johnston is a professor of professional practice at the Missouri School of Journalism where she’s been teaching for 20 years. She currently teaches writing and editing and works as an editor at the Columbia Missourian. 

Cite this article

Johnston, Laura  (2025, Dec. 8). Teaching a new generation of journalists AP Style. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/teaching-a-new-generation-of-journalists-ap-style/

Climate

Canada’s environmental ‘realism’ looks more like surrender | Tzeporah Berman

At a time when the UK and other countries are finally taking bold steps for climate, Canada is preparing a new oil pipeline

Last week, the United Kingdom did something all too rare: it chose leadership by backing science and prioritizing public safety. The Labour government announced it would ban new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, strengthen a windfall tax and accelerate phasing out of fossil-fuel subsidies.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are an acknowledgment that the global energy system is shifting and that mature economies must shift with it.

Tzeporah Berman is a Canadian environmental activist, campaigner and writer

Continue reading...
Climate

Scientists uncover a volcanic trigger behind the Black Death

A newly analyzed set of climate data points to a major volcanic eruption that may have played a key role in the Black Death’s arrival. Cooling and crop failures across Europe pushed Italian states to bring in grain from the Black Sea. Those shipments may have carried plague-infected fleas. The study ties together tree rings, ice cores, and historical writings to reframe how the pandemic began.
Journalism, News-tech

How to Civilize Digital Life

Samuel D. Warren II and Louis D. Brandeis

The Right to Privacy is a brief written by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren and published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. It has not been improved upon since, because what it says is so damn obvious and simple: that the right to privacy is “the right to be let alone.”

Those six words are well understood by everyone in the natural world, and have been for the history of civilized life. Hell, probably before that as well. But they are alien in the digital world.

Here’s why: Our knowledge of privacy in the natural world is tacit, meaning we know what it is but can’t easily explain it. Meanwhile, the digital world is entirely explicit. It is made of bits and code.

We don’t yet have a way to make explicit our wish to be let alone in the digital world. Or how we might not, and for what purposes.

“Consents” such as those provided by cookie notices can’t do it, because all the agency you have is what they provide, and they have little or no interest in obeying whatever “choices” you’ve made about being tracked. They might not even be able to do more than put up one of those notices. To see how total the suckage is, read this, this, this, this, or this. It’s a fecosystem, folks. 100-proof bullshit.

For real privacy, we need to make our requirements explicit, and enforceable. That’s why we now have IEEE 7012-2025 Approved Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Its nickname is MyTerms, much as IEEE 802.11 is nicknamed Wi-Fi. After years in the works, MyTerms will be published on 22 January of next year, a little over a month from now.

MyTerms is for privacy what TCP/IP is for the Internet and HTTP/HTTPS is for the Web: a foundation atop which an infinitude of products and services can be built—ones that can’t be built so long as privacy is a corporate grace and not a personal right, and all customer-company relationships are exclusively under company control. Simply put, if your privacy is in the hands of others alone, you don’t have any.

The way MyTerms works could hardly be more simple. (That’s one reason developing the standard took so damn long.)

  1. You (the person), acting as the first party, proffer a personal privacy agreement to every site or service you meet, or know.
  2. If they, as the second parties, agree, you both keep identical records of the agreement, so compliance can be audited or disputed (if need be) in the future. Since MyTerms are contracts, enforcement follows contract law.
  3. You will choose the agreement from a short list posted on the Web by a disinterested nonprofit such as Customer Commons, which was created for that purpose. (The model for this is Creative Commons. MyTerms will be for personal privacy what Creative Commons is for personal copyright. We thank them for tilling that field for us.)
  4. Both parties use agents. These can be as simple as a browser and Web server (e.g. WordPress or Drupal) plug-ins, or as fancy as AI agents on both sides (such as many companies use to work out B2B agreements).
  5. The flow looks like this:

In the sense that these are manners, this is a protocol. But it’s not a technical one. All the tech is up to developers.

To help imagine out how this goes, here is one way MyTerms might look in a browser with a MyTerms plugin that manifests a couple of buttons in the browser header (DuckDuckGo‘s in this case):

The left ⊂ is your side of a potential or actual agreement, and the right ⊃ is the website’s side. With colors, additional symbols (for example within the ⊂ and ⊃, or other UI hacks, these might show states —

  • Willingness to engage by either side
  • State of engagement
  • Additional information (including agreements built on top of the original MyTerms one), such as VRM + CRM relationships
  • Records of what’s happening within those relationships, for example market intelligence that flows both ways

The symbols might have pop-down menus with choices and links that go elsewhere. The possibilities are wide open.

I choose ProjectVRM for an example, because it’s ready to agree to a visitor’s proffered MyTerm, and a bunch of us did a lot of thinking and working on this problem (and opportunity) back in the ’00s and early ’10s. For one example, look here.

We started ProjectVRM, created Customer Commons, and developed MyTerms, all to open markets to far horizons that cannot be imagined, much less seen, from inside silos and walled gardens built to keep people captive while harvesting vast amounts of personal data just so people can be guessed at by parasites (such as what most advertisers have now become).

By starting with privacy—real privacy—we can finally civilize the digital world. We can also set countless new tables in the marketplace. These are tables across which demand and supply can converse, relate, and transact in countless ways that are simply impossible in the consent-to-surveillance fecosystem.

We can finally fulfill the prophesies I made in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls for in his new book This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), specifically in Chapter 17, “Attention vs. Intention.”

Let’s finish Tim’s story.

If you want to help with that, contact the MyTerms team through the form at the bottom of every page at MyTerms.info. Thanks!

Climate

Researchers solve a century-old North Atlantic cold spot mystery

A century-old North Atlantic cold patch is now linked to a long-term slowdown in the AMOC, the climate-regulating conveyor belt of ocean water. Only weakened-AMOC models match observed temperature and salinity patterns, overturning recent model trends. This slowdown affects weather systems, jet streams, and marine life throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The discovery sharpens climate forecasts and highlights a major shift already underway.
Journalism, News-tech

Communities Notes

A winning non-strategy

When I headed to the Bay Area in 1984, years of success and championships followed for the 49ers, the A's, and the Giants.

When I came to Boston in '07, the Patriots went undefeated (except for the Super Bowl), and the Red Sox and Celtics won championships. Then the Pats and the Sox continued on that path.

Now I'm in Bloomington, Indiana, witnessing the IU Hoosiers football team win the Big 10 championship and continue its undefeated season.

Coincidence? Yes, but a fun one.

Also coming to Bloomington

New Public has launched a new community organizing tool called Roundabout, plus Local Lab: a way create digital public spaces. Eli Pariser, a New Public co-founder, explains Local Lab here. He will also speak about all this stuff next month here at Indiana University as part of the salon series we put together with the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Mark your calendars now: Thursday, 22 January at 4pm Eastern. It will be on Zoom as well as live here.

But you're free to feel the same anywhere

They don't like Temu in Arizona.

Brilliant and right

I avoid politics here, but I can't resist pointing to this post by Daniel Barkhuff, emergency room MD, former Navy SEAL, and A-1 writer.

An additional thought is that after political conservatism recovers from MAGA fever, it will be much sharper than it was before.  It may take longer for the Left. Just a guess.

We need both. We need the Right's sense of how business works, the value of thrift, and other stuff like that. We need the Left's sense of how government works and can care for people. We also need AND logic between the two. OR logic is a big fail.

Picking the UnLocke

I just updated this 2009 post, so its single link points to this post by Chris Locke in the Internet Archive. Chris had twelve years left at the time. Among his not-famous but no longer lost words:

Did we fall asleep? Just for a little while.

We only have a little while to live. Such a precious time to be here. Wherever here is. To see each other and this awesome, incredible world. So let us not talk falsely now. Let us be what we truly are, which is human, and try to get our heads and hearts around what that might conceivably mean.

And mostly, miracles of science notwithstanding, let us not take ourselves too overfuckingseriously.

I miss his ass.

Journalism, News-tech

It’s still now

Walter Cronkite, in a 1963 photo by Bernard_Gotfryd

And that’s the way it is, Friday, December 6, 2025

I try to come up with unique headlines for my daily bloggings through Wordland. I can’t call the day’s blog the date, because the blog already puts the date above the headline. So today it would stack like this
December 5, 2025
December 5, 2025
with the upper one in the theme’s blue-green type and the lower one in headline bold. Can’t have that. But I also need the headline to work with all I put below it, which might be anything. Anyway, that’s an explanation of yet another whatever on the edge of your life that you didn’t need to know. Cue Walter Cronkite.

Huge loss

LA Times: Frank Gehry gone at 96. (Alas, paywall.)

The best bet is that it won’t end

I like Dave’s Pluribus theories. I do agree that there is a love story to be had between Carol and Zosia. And I think it would be cool if what’s under the tarp is the missing child in Down Cemetery Road. But, since future seasons are planned…

What an improvement

MIT Technology Review: AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements: A conversation with a chatbot can shift people’s political views—but the most persuasive models also spread the most misinformation.

Pubmedia

PRX and AudioUK Announce 2026 Podcast Creator Summit in London

The all-day event on February 6 will take place in Apple’s London offices at Battersea Power Station, featuring free workshops and learning sessions for podcasters

Public media organization PRX — bringing acclaimed podcasts and radio to millions — and AudioUK — the industry body dedicated to advancing podcasting and audio — today announced a 2026 Podcast Creator Summit in London, UK, inviting podcasters of all experience levels to share and gain insights spanning the art and business of making podcasts and audio.

The free summit is organized in partnership with Apple Podcasts, and will take place on Friday, February 6 at Battersea Power Station in London. Sessions will include in-person seminars, talks, and workshops led by acclaimed creators and industry experts.

Sign up here to receive updates and instructions, for a chance to attend the summit in London. The speaking lineup will be announced in January.

“After two successful years in the US, meeting independent creators and supporting local podcast and audio communities, we are thrilled at the opportunity to expand overseas to a podcast market as significant as the UK,” said Stephanie Kuo, VP of Content at PRX. “We hope podcasters of all backgrounds and experience levels will join us, especially producers and independent creators early in their journeys.”

“We’re excited to build on our track record of providing standout development and event experiences by partnering with two global leaders in podcasting and audio, Apple and PRX, to bring to life an inspiring new event for UK creators,” said Chloe Straw, CEO of AudioUK. “The Podcast Creator Summit offers a unique opportunity for creators to come together for community building and creative mastery at Apple’s iconic Battersea Power Station. Attendees will benefit from expert-led sessions featuring insights from right across the industry.”

AudioUK has a strong track record in delivering high-impact training and industry events. In 2025 alone, the organization relaunched its Audiotrain program as an always-on video learning platform; hosted Podcast x TV networking events in London and Manchester; delivered the first Power of Podcasting Ads showcase in London; hosted the independent business stage at The Podcast Show; and has run its annual awards, the APAs, celebrating excellence across the industry.

PRX convened several Podcast Creator Summits in 2025 in the United States, including in Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia in partnership with local public media stations KUT and WABE. Presenters included creative leaders from iHeartPodcasts, Tenderfoot TV, Audacy, The Roost, City Cast, Exactly Right Media, and more.

About PRX

Celebrating more than 20 years as a nonprofit public media company, PRX works in partnership with leading independent creators, organizations, and stations to bring meaningful audio storytelling into millions of listeners’ lives. PRX is one of the world’s top podcast publishers, public radio distributors, and audio producers, serving as an engine of innovation for public media and podcasting to help shape a vibrant future for creative and journalistic audio. Shows across PRX’s portfolio of broadcast productions, podcast partners, and its Radiotopia podcast network have received recognition from the Peabody Awards, the Tribeca Festival, the International Documentary Association, the National Magazine Awards, and the Pulitzer Prizes. Visit prx.org for more.

About Audio UK

AudioUK is the industry body dedicated to advancing podcasting and audio, by fostering innovation, supporting creators and businesses, and driving commercial and creative growth. Through advocacy, training programs, networking opportunities, and industry events, AudioUK helps shape the future of podcasting and audio in the UK and beyond. By connecting creators, producers, and businesses, AudioUK ensures that talent thrives, ideas flourish, and the industry continues to expand both creatively and commercially. For more information, resources, and to find out how to join, visit audiouk.org.uk.

PRX and AudioUK Announce 2026 Podcast Creator Summit in London was originally published in PRX Official on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Climate

What I saw reporting on the American lives cut short by killer heat

In this week’s newsletter: Coroners can’t agree on how to count heat fatalities – and the dismantling of climate investments is leaving fragile communities exposed

• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Donald Trump’s decision to boycott Cop30, withdraw the US from the Paris agreement and illegally terminate a slew of investments in renewable energy will not change the reality of climate breakdown for Americans.

In what has become an annual reporting tradition, I found myself in Arizona reporting on heat-related deaths during yet another gruelling heatwave, when temperatures topped 43C (110F) on 13 out of 14 straight days in Phoenix. Before embarking on this trip, I spent weeks combing through hundreds of autopsy reports, which I obtained from two county medical examiners using the Freedom of Information Act. Each death report gave me a glimpse into the person’s life, and I used clues from the case notes to track down friends and loved ones in the hopes of better understanding why heat is killing people in the richest country in the world.

How cyclones and monsoon rains converged to devastate parts of Asia – visual guide

The environmental costs of corn: should the US change how it grows its dominant crop?

‘Those who eat Chilean salmon cannot imagine how much human blood it carries with it’

Americans are dying from extreme heat. Autopsy reports don’t show the full story

‘Deeply demoralizing’: how Trump derailed coal country’s clean-energy revival

‘It happened so fast’: the shocking reality of indoor heat deaths in Arizona

Continue reading...
Journalism

Aftercare (is not an afterthought)

Shared practices of care for secondary trauma

How many of us have felt that we do not have the right to feel affected, that we are only listening to a traumatic story, or that we have the luxury of exiting the space and heading home — what right do we have to feel sad? On the other hand, we have also witnessed countless colleagues, or have ourselves, faced burnout, anxiety-related health conditions, addictions, and struggles with maintaining healthy relationships and connections. 

Historically journalists have often been discouraged from recognizing the secondhand trauma they come into contact with. You may even feel nervous about discussing mental health or anxiety in the workplace for fear of repercussions, loss of income, or from the feeling of guilt that arises from being a witness.

Aftercare is not just “a nice thought to have” or a luxury for someone else but both the last step of our trauma-informed session and the first step of the next. It is a way of resetting the body to come into the next session regulated, congruent, and ready to hold space for future participants. 

What is secondary trauma?

“Vicarious traumatization,” otherwise known as “secondary trauma,” describes the cumulative effects of exposure to and empathetic engagement with traumatic events. Common signs of vicarious trauma include: social withdrawal, avoiding physical intimacy, stress-related medical conditions, negative coping skills, cynicism, loss of hope, disassociation, compulsive behavior, nightmares, decreased sense of self-worth and self-esteem, burnout, and the inability to function at work. 

The repetitious exposure to traumatic information or events is, in itself, traumatic. We hope it is at least affirming to hear that the effects of secondary trauma are real and, if you are experiencing any of the above effects, know that you are not alone and you deserve to receive support in managing them. 

While care rituals are essential to incorporate into our practice, oftentimes it is not enough when we are experiencing overwhelming impacts from this work. If you are experiencing significant distress, are self-medicating with substances, or if you are simply unable to sustain your work due to burnout, it is recommended that you seek professional medical and/or mental health guidance immediately. 

A place to start

  1. Immediately following the session, find a simple, physical, repeatable transition. Something that tells your nervous system, “Now we’re somewhere new.” 

    Examples: 
    • Change your clothes
    • Take a shower 
    • Put your camera in a different room. 
  2. Drink a glass of water or tea. Uncaffeinated preferred. 
  3. Set a timer for 20 minutes to just breathe for a bit. Don’t look at the images yet. 

    Examples:
    • Go for a walk.
    • Take your shoes off
    • Journal
    • Phone a friend, someone that gives you energy and/or ease. 

Child with a cardboard box over their head in a room decorated with balloons
Photo: Natalie Keyssar 

Aftercare practices shared by photographers/visual journalists via an open call

N: Rest. Talk it out with people who have had similar experiences. Work out like crazy. Start a meditation practice—understand it’s going to hit you in very weird ways and the response is often delayed. Rest more. Do stuff in your life that has zero to do with photojournalism with friends who love you. Garden; do physical tactile projects that make you feel accomplished and tired and human, then try to help the people you saw hurting in a way beyond photography which we all know isn’t enough. 

E: Therapy is critical. Also decompression tools: meditation, bath, a hot shower, music, drawing, a television show I can invest myself in. 

M: For me, it’s about prioritizing spending time doing something that brings me joy. I think about blocking out time to do that the same way I would for an interview, assignment, or meeting. Otherwise, I’d keep putting it off. In my case, it’s getting outside and getting in the dirt. Lately, it’s been especially about experimenting with germination. As my friend said, “You can’t plant a seed and not have hope.”

H: I get a lot of the care I need to show up fully by walking with trees or any nature that’s available. The trips to and from are little rituals that help me shift in and out of that space. Letting it sink in that what we’ve done together has given the women [I photograph] a sense of being understood. That washes over me and I feel vibrant despite all the trauma. Also poetry, lots of poetry. 

A:  I find yoga and time in nature to be most restorative after a difficult assignment.They both get me off of my devices and back in my body. While on assignment, I’m also really careful to eat healthy and to get as much sleep as possible. I also like to make herbal tea at bedtime. It helps me feel more centered and able to fall asleep. 

M: Breathe and take a break from the images before you go through them! I don’t edit until I have some space away from the heavy interaction. Usually I go for a long walk or a comfort meal, talk with a loved one about it first so any secondhand trauma doesn’t just stay bottled up too.

J: Whether I’m working as a photographer, creative facilitator, or editor — especially in intense or sensitive contexts — I sometimes engage myself in or offer to others (i.e. the photographers I’m working with) a reflective practice that involves a series of freewriting prompts to reflect on photographs after some time has passed since they were made — whether that’s days, weeks, months, or even years. I’ve been surprised by what emerges from this process, and how often it can be instructive not only for better understanding the project or interaction but also for releasing or accessing deeper insights into my own experience

Invitation

What are your aftercare practices?  We invite you to share with us your own aftercare practices and insights for our forthcoming resource.

Cite this article

Jacklin-Stratton, Jennifer; and Blesener, Sarah  (2025, Dec. 4). Aftercare (is not an afterthought). Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/aftercare-is-not-an-afterthought/

Climate

Leading by Example at France Télévisions

In the wake of a disappointing COP30 in Brazil and fears that pro-climate forces are losing the information war, France Télévisions is moving in the other direction.

The national public broadcaster in France, among the most-watched French-language media companies in the world, announced that it is joining Covering Climate Now, our global collaboration of more than 500 newsrooms committed to publishing more and better climate coverage.

France Télévisions brings more than heft to the consortium, though it certainly has that: The group’s holdings include four national television channels, 24 regional channels, nine overseas channels and radio stations, and an array of digital services. 

But perhaps more importantly, the broadcaster has shown a long commitment to covering the climate story — and its approach can offer inspiration to other newsrooms feeling pressure to back off of climate coverage at exactly the wrong time.

In 2024, the outlet’s climate editor, Audrey Cerdan, was honored in the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards for her work integrating climate change into the reporting across the network. France Télévisions has replaced its traditional evening weathercast with Journal Météo Climat, or “weather-climate report.” In the segment, reporters still tell viewers how hot or cold, rainy, or sunny it will be, but this information is provided in the context of climate change; for example, a display graphic might show how much hotter temperatures are compared to pre-Industrial levels. 

“France Télévisions has long been a leader in showing how to produce climate coverage with impact across a newsroom,” said Mark Hertsgaard, CCNow co-founder and executive director. “We’re thrilled that they will now continue that industry-leading work as a partner at Covering Climate Now.”

“France Télévisions has long been committed to offering climate coverage that is close to the daily and local questions of our audiences, all the while explaining the global stakes and complexities of this major crisis,” said Virginie Fichet, deputy director of France Télévisions’ newsroom, in charge of climate. “We are pleased to join CCNow, an international network of hundreds of newsrooms, with whom we look forward to collaborating in the future.”

In recent months, CCNow partners around the world have joined forces in The 89 Percent Project, a surge in coverage aimed at highlighting the fact that an overwhelming majority of people in the world — between 80 and 89% — are concerned about the climate crisis and want their governments to do something about it. Last month, ProPublica, the investigative newsroom and winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes, signed on as a CCNow partner.

Amid a fog of disinformation around climate and a political backlash in some parts of the world, never has there been a more important time for newsrooms to recommit to covering the most important story of our time. France Télévisions provides a roadmap for how to do it.

From Us

Prep your winter coverage webinar. Forget summer heat; winter is warming faster than any other season across most of the US with climate change making cold snaps less frequent and less frigid. Join CCNow and Climate Central on Tuesday, December 9, at 12pm ET, for the latest in our Prep Your Climate Coverage series for this one-hour briefing on how climate change is impacting winter in the US. RSVP.

Noteworthy Stories

Extreme weather. Two tropical cyclones and a typhoon caused heavy rainfall and widespread flooding and landslides in South and Southeast Asia last week, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,250 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand alone, with many still missing. By Lyndal Rowlands for Al Jazeera…

Alarming shift. Africa’s rainforests are now emitting carbon instead of storing it, contributing to climate change instead of preventing it. Since 2010, the three largest rainforest regions in the world — the South American Amazon, Southeast Asia, and Africa — have all shifted, “[underscoring] the need for urgent action to save the world’s great natural climate stabilisers.” By Jonathan Watts for The Guardian…

Belt and Road Initiative. A massive, ultra-modern new port in Peru is the first South American project completed as part of China’s $1.3 billion Belt and Road Initiative, but environmental and forest scientists worry that new trade routes to it will harm the Amazon. This story is part of “Planet China,” a series that explores how “Beijing’s trillion-dollar development plan is reshaping the globe — and the natural world.” By Georgina Gustin for Inside Climate News… 

Climate denial. After the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world celebrated a shared commitment to address climate change, but 10 years later, climate mis- and disinformation are rampant, and proving an obstacle to action. By Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers for The New York Times…

Long read. The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff spent months compiling this comprehensive report that details how the Trump administration decimated Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act so quickly and completely. “Where did those who crafted it go wrong?”

Quote of the Week

“The dinosaurs didn’t know what was coming, but we do.”

— Brazil’s environment minister Marina Silva on what needs to follow COP30 in an interview with The Guardian

Resources & Events

Attribution science. Climate Central is out with a new guide that explains how meteorologists   are able to quantify the role of climate change in extreme weather events and wildfires. The resource includes “a new table of ready-to-use messages about multiple types of extreme weather” that journalists can use with confidence. Read more.

Webinar for climate journalists and communicators. Join the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication for ”Creators and Climate Campaigns: How to Partner with Trusted Messengers to Build Effective Climate Communication Strategies,” on Wednesday, December 10, at 12pm ET. Learn more.

Jobs, Etc.

Mongabay is looking for an English-language associate fellowship editor and Portuguese-language fellowship editor (remote). The Los Angeles Times is seeking an energy and climate reporter (El Segundo, Calif.). McClatchy Media is looking for a coastal climate reporter (Columbia, S.C.). Illinois Public Media is accepting applications for an agriculture/environmental reporter (Urbana, Ill.).

Paid internships. The University of Miami’s Campus Climate Network (CCN) and the Climate Accountability Lab (CAL) are hiring college students to conduct research on their universities’ ties to the fossil fuel industry in spring 2026. Learn more + apply.

JAWS 2026 Health Reporting Fellowship offers mentoring, training, and a stipend to early career journalists or journalists new to the health beat. Apply by December 5.

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Climate

France Télévisions Joins Covering Climate Now

For release: December 3, 2025

Press contact: editors@coveringclimatenow.org

France Télévisions contact: Claire Deshoux / claire.deshoux@francetv.fr

Covering Climate Now is thrilled to announce that France Télévisions, the national public broadcaster in France, is joining our global journalistic collaboration of newsrooms from around the world.

With four national television channels, 24 regional channels, nine overseas channels and radio stations, and a complete range of digital services with a streaming platform and news websites, France Télévisions is the most-watched French media company in the world.

It also has been a leader in climate reporting. In 2024, the company’s climate editor, Audrey Cerdan, was honored in the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards for her work integrating climate change into the reporting across the network. France Télévisions has replaced its traditional evening weathercast with a new segment, Journal Météo Climat, or “weather-climate report.” In the segment, reporters still tell viewers how hot or cold, rainy, or sunny it will be, but this information is provided in the context of climate change; for example, a display graphic might show how much hotter temperatures are compared to pre-Industrial levels.

“France Télévisions has long been a leader in showing how to produce climate coverage with impact across a newsroom,” said Mark Hertsgaard, CCNow co-founder and executive director. “We’re thrilled that they will now continue that industry-leading work as a partner at Covering Climate Now.”

At CCNow, France Télévisions will be joining more than 500 newsrooms from around the world, all committed to more and better climate coverage. In October, ProPublica, the investigative newsroom and winner of eight Pulitzer Prizes, signed on as a CCNow partner.

“France Télévisions is committed to offering climate coverage that is close to the daily and local questions of our audiences, all the while explaining the global stakes and complexities of this major crisis,” said Virginie Fichet, deputy director of France Télévisions’ newsroom, in charge of climate. “We are pleased to join CCNow, an international network of hundreds of newsrooms, with whom we look forward to collaborating in the future.”

In recent months, CCNow partners around the world have joined forces in The 89 Percent Project, a surge in coverage aimed at highlighting the fact that an overwhelming majority of people in the world — between 80 and 89% — are concerned about the climate crisis and want their governments to do something about it.

News organizations everywhere are invited to join CCNow and to participate in The 89 Percent Project, which runs through the spring of 2026. There is no financial cost and no editorial line to follow, except respect for climate science. Inquiries should be sent to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.

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Climate

Cómo cubrir los resultados de la COP30

Radar Clima es el boletín en español de Covering Climate Now. Cada dos semanas repasamos un tema clave para periodistas -especialistas o generalistas- desde la conexión climática y la lente de los tres pilares del periodismo climático: Humanizar, Localizar y Solucionar. 

No olvides hacer la conexión climática en tus historias y basarla en la ciencia. Conectar los hechos con el cambio climático permite explicar las causas, responsabilidades y soluciones, y ayuda a tu audiencia a entender por qué es importante.

Si has recibido este email de un o una colega y quieres suscribirte, o si quieres ver nuestros boletines en inglés, haz clic aquí.

LO QUE TIENES QUE SABER

La COP30 ha sobrevivido, pero no ha brillado. Tras dos semanas intensas y una buena dosis de caos (inundaciones, un incendio, protestas y bloqueos), la cumbre de la Amazonía concluyó el 22 de noviembre con el acuerdo “Mutirão global” (un término de origen tupí-guaraní que significa “esfuerzo colectivo”) que mantiene vivas las negociaciones pero pospone decisiones clave. Brasil logró evitar el colapso en un contexto muy difícil, pero no pudo cumplir las ambiciones del presidente brasileño, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Combustibles fósiles y deforestación en el debate (pero fuera del texto)

En un año en el que la presión de la industria y el regreso de Trump amenazaban con enterrar cualquier discusión sobre petróleo, gas y carbón, la transición fósil estuvo sobre la mesa. El presidente Lula pidió explícitamente una hoja de ruta en su discurso inaugural, y al menos 85  países la respaldaron públicamente. Ante la oposición de algunos actores clave como China, India o Arabia Saudí, la referencia desapareció del texto. Como contrapartida, Brasil desarrollará dos hojas de ruta (sobre combustibles fósiles y deforestación) fuera del proceso formal de la ONU para presentarlas en la COP 31. Colombia y Países Bajos organizarán una conferencia sobre transición fósil en abril de 2026.

Adaptación: un compromiso ambiguo

El texto “llama a esfuerzos”, en un lenguaje que no establece compromisos concretos, que tripliquen el financiamiento dedicado a adaptación climática para 2035, cinco años más tarde que lo que algunos países habían pedido. Además del retraso, el acuerdo no especifica un año de referencia para calcular ese triple, lo que lleva a incertidumbre, que a su vez dificultará la inversión.

El comercio irrumpe en la COP

Por primera vez en una COP, el comercio internacional entró formalmente en las discusiones. El acuerdo establece tres diálogos entre 2026 y 2028 sobre medidas relacionadas con el clima. Algunos ven esto como un ejemplo positivo acerca de cómo las COPs pueden lidiar con temas del mundo real; otros temen que se convierta en un campo de batalla entre el Norte y el Sur Global.

La sociedad civil exige un lugar en la mesa.

Tras tres años de COPs en países con regímenes autoritarios (Egipto, Emiratos Árabes Unidos y Azerbaiyán), la sociedad civil recuperó su voz en Belém. Más de 400 líderes indígenas acudieron a la sede, el mayor número en la historia de estas cumbres. Decenas de manifestantes del pueblo Munduruku asaltaron y posteriormente bloquearon la entrada al recinto de negociaciones exigiendo protección territorial y un lugar en la mesa de negociaciones: de 2.500 representantes indígenas en Belém, tan solo el 14% (360) obtuvo acceso a la zona restringida de negociaciones, conocida como la Zona Azul. Brasil reaccionó de inmediato: anunció demarcaciones territoriales y 1.800 millones de dólares para financiar reclamaciones de tierras indígenas.

Lo que NO ocurrió

No hubo proceso para revisar planes climáticos (NDC, por sus siglas en inglés). No se acordó un mecanismo claro para cerrar la brecha hacia 1,5 °C. No hubo nuevos compromisos significativos de financiamiento climático por parte de países desarrollados. Estados Unidos estuvo ausente. Y, por primera vez en un texto de COP, se reconoce explícitamente que el mundo probablemente sobrepasará el límite de 1,5ºC.

Fuera de las negociaciones: algunos avances

Se comprometieron 9.500 millones de dólares, la mayor cantidad alcanzada en una COP, para la protección de bosques tropicales, incluyendo recursos para el nuevo Fondo Bosques Tropicales para Siempre (TFFF, en inglés). También se comprometieron 82.000 millones de dólares anuales para redes eléctricas y almacenamiento de energía, 300 millones para sistemas de salud resilientes al clima y 590 millones para reducción de metanol. Son compromisos que ahora habrá que vigilar para ver si realmente se cumplen.

HUMANIZAR

La COP30 dejó tensiones sin resolver que afectarán a personas reales durante 2026. Más allá de la diplomacia, hay comunidades que pagan el precio de cada palabra que desaparece de un texto, y otras que celebran victorias arrancadas con protestas.

Ángulos clave

  • ¿Qué significa para las comunidades en zonas vulnerables el reconocimiento oficial de que probablemente se sobrepasará el límite de 1,5 °C? ¿Conocen las personas que viven en estas zonas los impactos que este hecho supone? ¿Cómo cambia la relación con el futuro saber que tu tierra tiene fecha de caducidad?
  • ¿Cómo cambia, en la práctica, el día a día para una comunidad indígena el haber conseguido una demarcación territorial? ¿Qué se siente al tener seguridad legal sobre sus tierras ancestrales? ¿Qué miedos persisten?
  • ¿Qué significa, para la gente común en zonas vulnerables, el retraso en la financiación para adaptación climática? ¿Qué supone para una enfermera, un alcalde o una familia campesina esperar cinco años más? ¿Qué historias hay en hospitales o escuelas?

Historias para inspirarte

LOCALIZAR

Los acuerdos y los desacuerdos de la COP 30 tendrán consecuencias reales en territorios específicos. Conectar las negociaciones globales con lugares concretos es clave para que tu audiencia entienda qué está en juego.

Ángulos clave

  • ¿Qué barrios inundables, municipios vulnerables o comunidades costeras de tu ciudad o región podrían recibir, o necesitan los fondos de adaptación prometidos en Belém? ¿Quién decide qué zonas se protegen primero? ¿Cuáles se están quedando fuera, y por qué? 
  • ¿Qué selvas, ríos o humedales de tu región podrían beneficiarse de los 9.500 millones de dólares comprometidos para la protección de bosques tropicales? ¿Qué instituciones gestionarán esos fondos y cómo se garantizará su aplicación transparente y justa?
  • ¿Qué zonas agrícolas o industriales en tu país se enfrentarán a nuevos costos o requisitos por las medidas comerciales climáticas que se discutieron en Belém? ¿Qué pueblos o comarcas tendrán que adaptarse?

Historias para inspirarte

SOLUCIONAR

La COP no deja de ser una enorme reunión sobre soluciones climáticas. Todo lo que pasa allí acaba afectando, para bien o para mal, a las soluciones que países, ciudades y comunidades tratan de aplicar, tanto en materia de mitigación como en adaptación. 

Ángulos clave

  • ¿Cómo respaldan algunos de los principales países productores de combustibles fósiles de América Latina, como Colombia o México, su adhesión a las iniciativas voluntarias de transición fósil acordadas en la COP 30? ¿Qué planes para la reconversión económica y laboral se plantean?
  • ¿Qué papel están desempeñando las mujeres en el diseño e implementación de proyectos de adaptación climática en sus comunidades? ¿Qué proyectos liderados por mujeres están funcionando? ¿Qué barreras se encuentran para desarrollar soluciones a todos los niveles?
  • ¿Cómo afectan los resultados de las COP30 a los planes climáticos que tu país desarrolló en su NDC? ¿Qué tiene que cumplirse para que esos planes realmente se implementen y no queden en papel mojado? ¿Cómo puede involucrarse la sociedad civil en su implementación y la vigilancia de la misma?

Historias para inspirarte

EXPERTOS

  • Carlos Nobre (Instituto de Estudios Avanzados, Universidad de São Paulo): El doctor Carlos Nobre es uno de los más reconocidos expertos en el estudio de los impactos climáticos en la Amazonía.
  • Toya Manchineri (Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas de la Amazonía Brasileña, COIAB): Toya Manchineri es, además de Coordinador General de la COIAB, miembro del Comité Indígena del Cambio Climático (CIMC). Contactar a través del área de comunicación de COIAB (comunicacao@coiab.org.br)
  • Iliana Monterroso (Centro para la Investigación Forestal Internacional, CIFOR): La doctora Iliana Monterroso es bióloga y científica ambiental. Sus áreas de investigación son el género, la propiedad de la tierra, los derechos colectivos, la gobernanza medioambiental y los conflictos socio-ambientales en América Latina.

RECURSOS

  • Base de datos de expertos del Sur Global: Curada por Carbon Brief y la Red de Periodismo Climático de Oxford (OCJN), esta base de datos contiene más de 1000 contactos de personas expertas de África, Asia y Latinoamérica disponibles para consulta. Es un recurso imprescindible a la hora de cubrir una COP o sus resultados.
  • Para quienes quieran ampliar conocimientos, Carbon Brief ofrece un artículo extremadamente detallado con todos los resultados de la COP 30, así como cientos de enlaces y fuentes (en inglés).
  • El Instituto Talanoa publica esta guía para periodistas sobre Adaptación Climática. Disponible en español, portugués e inglés.

En dos semanas Radar Clima vuelve con una edición especial navideña, en la que te ayudaremos a enfrentarte, con argumentos climáticos, a tu audiencia más exigente: las cenas en familia

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