Climate Beacon Newsroom Initiative
Program Years: 2023-Current
Pictured: The staff of Osage News scout locations for visual storytelling. Osage News is one of the newsrooms in the Climate Beacon Newsroom Initiative’s 2024-2025 Solutions Visuals cohort. Photo by Tara Pixley.
Launched in 2023, the Climate Beacon Newsroom Initiative (CBNI) supports newsrooms in strengthening solutions-focused climate reporting newsroom-wide. In its first edition, nine newsrooms engaged their communities before reporting, prioritizing local voices and tracking the impact of their stories. Journalists became Beacon Leaders through SJN’s Train the Trainers program, then mentored their own newsrooms. Their work resulted in 130 digital or print stories, 13 television segments, 10 podcasts and four radio reports, amplifying solutions across multiple platforms.
In 2024, the initiative expanded with a new cohort of five newsrooms enhancing climate solutions reporting specifically through visual storytelling. Over the course of a year, these newsrooms produced more than 15 visual stories, including digital, multimedia, print and video. They also presented their work at several industry conferences including Society of Environmental Journalists, Indigenous Media Conference and IRE AccessFest.
In 2025, SJN launched the CBNI Indigenous Climate Solutions Cohort in partnership with the Indigenous Journalists Association. The five selected Indigenous-led and -serving newsrooms will gain a deep understanding of solutions journalism and use these skills to produce meaningful climate solutions coverage, as they center Indigenous voices, for and with their communities.
Why Climate Solutions Reporting Matters
In study after study, climate change appears as one of the top issues making people most anxious about the future and least optimistic that the problem can be solved. Much of the alarm-first journalistic coverage has led to people retreating into disengagement and disbelief. That’s why these nine newsrooms are shifting to Climate Solutions Reporting.
Transforming Climate Coverage
Nine newsrooms expanded their climate solutions coverage in partnership with their communities, and spread that work to many beats within their organizations. The participants were: Capital & Main, Grist, 9 Millones, the Reader, The Sacramento Bee, The Sweaty Penguin, Telemundo 51, The Washington Informer and WSHU.
Leveling Up Climate Solutions Visuals
As part of the Climate Beacon Newsroom Initiative, the Solutions Journalism Network works with U.S.-based newsrooms looking to expand, experiment with and refine their visual coverage of the responses to climate change and how those solutions intersect with issues like health, economics and civic life. The Solutions Visuals program trains newsrooms to move beyond images of disaster and devastation and develop the visual storytelling skills needed to capture climate solutions in action.
