Climate change journalism meets social media

It’s expected that 40 world leaders will attend this year’s COP15 climate change talks in Denmark next month to hammer out the details for what is hoped will be the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Fifteen journalists, winners in the Earth Journalism Awards, are being flown to Copenhagen to cover the two week conference.

The organisers, the Earth Journalism Network, are making great use of social media to plug this event – obviously they’re marketing the awards themselves all over the usual social media, but there is also a final sixteenth award which is determined by user interaction. All fifteen journalists are finalists, and the whole world gets to vote for an overall winner of the Global Public Award using the EJA site, but also on Twitter by retweeting #ejavote and the URL of the story. Additionally, each entry has its own Facebook fan page, for which every fan constitutes a vote.

This is a great mobilisation of social media tools to get what is an environmental/political issue under the noses of the millions of tweeters and Facebook fiends.

Local journo, John Pickrell from Australia’s own Cosmos Magazine (they who brought us HelloFromEarth.net), is one of the fifteen finalists for his piece on ocean acidification and its effects on our very own Great Barrier Reef. You can read his and all the other finalists’ articles on the EJA website and make your voice heard – http://awards.earthjournalism.org/finalists.

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