Fresh to CUNY Graduate Journalism School and with just a few weeks of training under their belts, a team of more than 30 students last week launched an ambitious crowdsourcing project on climate change risk in New York.
The effort includes real-time multimedia reporting from vulnerable communities, crowdsourced data collection on residents’ views, and extensive community engagement efforts via social media. The project will culminate with a reported analysis of how well the city is preparing at-risk areas for the perils of extreme weather and flooding from sea-level rise.
The students, drawn from two interactive classes taught by Associate Professor Adam Glenn, of the school’s interactive faculty, partnered on the special project with public watchdog news site Gotham Gazette, the non-profit NY Environment Report, and Glenn’s AdaptNY project, an experimental news and information hub covering the city’s preparation for climate change.
Teams had prepared for weeks to produce several hours of live reporting on the views of community members from two especially at-risk New York neighborhoods – Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The “Are You Climate Safe?” initiative then officially got underway Oct. 2 with a morning of streaming coverage using the live event coverage platform CoverItLive (you can view the archived live coverage from Red Hook and from the Lower East Side).
On-the-ground news teams reported back from the communities with “person on the street” interviews and reporters’ notebooks, using a combination of stills, audio, video and text.
Research teams, meanwhile, had prepared detailed dossiers on each area, which teams of event producers then peppered throughout the live coverage, along with polls, factoids and insights into the issues challenging the communities.
Wrap-ups team that had already published an advance story on the project, then within a few hours afterwards prepared a detailed followup report of the morning’s findings, including an extensive interactive map of reported material.
And throughout, social media teams encouraged community conversation around an #AreYouClimateSafe hashtag on Twitter, and via two neighborhood Facebook pages, one for Red Hook, the other for the Lower East Side, created especially for the project.
Simultaneously, the student teams began collecting crowdsourcing data on views about climate safety from residents of the two communities. The data is being gathered via an online survey that asks: “Two years after Sandy, do you believe you’re safer.”
The survey form, which will be distributed to residents via both social media promotion and low-tech flyers, also will collect views on a variety of related climate risk issues, as well as extensive demographic data.
Ultimately, the crowdsourced findings, along with reporting from the neighborhoods and the offices of city government, will feed into a detailed analysis on how well the city is preparing these at-risk areas for the perils of extreme weather and flooding from sea-level rise. Those findings will be published on the partner sites later in October.
Gotham Gazette and AdaptNY had once before partnered on a special investigative report about the city’s climate risk preparedness, when in October 2013, they uncovered a disconnect between City Hall planners and some of NY vulnerable communities in the planning for greater climate resilience. That project also involved about a dozen student researchers and reporters, as well as alumni.
To learn more or to take part in the “Are You Climate Safe” project, visit the links below.
- Participate in our online survey– “Are You Climate Safe”
- Join the conversation on our Red Hook Facebook page, our Lower East Side Facebook page, or using our #AreYouClimateSafe hashtag on Twitter
- View our archived live coverage from Red Hook or from the Lower East Side
- Read more about the project in an advance story or in a followup on our field reporting
UPDATE: The project’s final investigative report was published here by Gotham Gazette on Oct. 24, just a few days shy of the two-year Sandy anniversary.