36 GENIUS INTERVIEW Greg Gilderman & Kevin Hayes
meteorologist, and saying, ‘What’s the deal with this? How is weather behaving in southeast Georgia? Because it looks like farmers there are having a hard time’. Then getting real data back. Talking to people who know the importance of that data is just an absolute joy. meteorologist, Kait Parker, has worked on stories about toxic algae in the Gulf of Mexico and the story I just mentioned about farmers in southern Georgia. These are people using the data to tell them where the stories are. FEED: How has The Weather Company been expanding and innovating in its coverage around climate change? GREG GILDERMAN: We have a very easy starting point that makes storytelling and coverage of climate change much clearer: it’s real, it’s happening and we’re already beginning to feel the impacts of it. Once you say that, it frees you up to really engage with the ancillary and human issues of climate change. A lot of our philosophy around covering it is to look for human impact, see how it’s affecting people on the ground and look for unexpected impacts. When people pitch polar bear stories, we start getting bored Stories also originate from our meteorologists. Our on-camera
WHEN IS IT APPROPRIATE TO PULL CLIMATE CHANGE INTO THESE STORIES? FOR US, THE ANSWER IS USUALLYWHEN THE SCIENCE SAYS SO
because it’s been covered in depth. We know the impact there. Let’s go beyond that; see how people are being impacted. KEVIN HAYES: Two years ago, we did a graphic novel about the Marshall Islands, drawn by Nate Powell, who was the artist who drew the National Book Award-winning March , which was a comic biography of civil rights leader and US congressman, John Lewis. The Marshall Islands have a covenant with the US that stems from atomic bomb testing in the fifties. The Marshallese have essentially all the rights of permanent residents in the US automatically. Marshall Islanders can move to the US, get jobs, get an education. It isn’t citizenship, but they have a lot of rights on US soil. At the same time, the Marshall Islands are being impacted by sea level rise. So younger Marshallese moving to America are actually
worried that after they come here, after they get that education to get a job, they’re not going to be able to move back home or they’re not going to want to because the island has changed so much. I think that’s a creative look at that story and one of these ancillary impacts that deals with diplomacy, history and migration, with climate change beating in the background the whole time. GREG GILDERMAN: We’re also doing podcasting. We have an enterprise podcast series about the history of misinformation and climate change. Its working title is The Big Lie . And we have a climate change- focused podcast called Warming Signs . So, this is in addition to the documentaries, the feature projects and enterprise projects Kevin has overseen. Also, once a week – or more than once a week – we do a short-form climate change story. We’re really trying to reach people
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