We are pleased to present a new series about how Columbia Journalism School has been training its students to become leading climate change reporters. With changes in the climate endangering lives, ecologies, and economies at global and local levels, the work of journalists is vital for effectively and accurately explaining the science and implications of climate change to the public. In this alumni spotlight, we talked with Dino Grandoni, a 2015 graduate of the Master of Arts Program, Science Concentration. Grandoni is currently an energy and environmental policy reporter for the Washington Post and the author of PowerPost's daily tipsheet on the beat, 'The Energy 202.' Please read below to learn about how Columbia Journalism School changed Grandoni's career trajectory, and why he is committed to reporting about climate change.
What is your current beat at the Washington Post?
Right now, I am the energy and environmental reporter at the Washington Post. I cover a lot issues there, coming from Congress, from the E.P.A., from the Interior Department, from the Energy Department, you name it. The Columbia M.A. Science Program has given me a grounding in the fundamentals of climate science and that has helped me do my work, reporting on stories and writing with efficiency and confidence.
Why has your work remained focused on climate change?
I don't have a personal story, as some people do, about some climate related thing affecting them. I just recognized as a reporter that climate change is going to be the biggest story of my lifetime. I wanted to report about it. If I'm going to spend my journalistic career doing anything, I wanted it to be about the most important story. I want to be able to look back on my life as an old man and feel like, as a journalist, I had reported on something that was worthwhile.
What led you to apply to the Master of Arts Program's Science Concentration?
I was working at the Huffington Post for about two years as their technology editor, reporting and editing stories about Facebook, Apple, Google, and the different things that they were doing. Eventually I felt like this was not what I wanted to be reporting on: the latest iPhone that was coming out, the latest Facebook updates. It didn't seem like something that I wanted to be spending my time as a journalist writing about. So, I thought to myself: "what is the most important story that's going to be happening in my lifetime?" I came to the conclusion that it would be climate change. And, I thought to myself: "what do I need to do to start reporting on this topic? It's a difficult subject and you need some sort of knowledge of the science to write about it well." So, I looked back at Columbia, my college alma mater, and saw that they had this M.A. program for experienced journalists that allowed them to specialize in science reporting and that there was a big environmental and climate change component to the curriculum. That's why I did the program.
What was it like to be a student in the M.A. Science Concentration?
It was an incredible program. Marguerite Holloway and Jonathan Weiner have been the two best professors that I've ever had at Columbia and I went here as an undergraduate, so I know this school really well. I gained an understanding of how science is conducted, how science is funded, how science is disseminated that I don't think I would have gotten in a year's-length time anywhere else. I think of it as an accelerant to my career. I maybe could have gotten to where I am right now without the program but it might have taken ten years, whereas, with the Columbia M.A. program, it's taken a much shorter period of time to get to where I am right now.
What stood out about Professors Holloway and Weiner?
Marguerite Holloway, who was my thesis advisor, was incredibly generous with her time. I've never been more excited to go to a class than to go to her class. She just was a delight to be with; she made learning these topics really fun. She has the chops to teach us how to report on these topics in a real serious way.
Jonathan Weiner is an excellent writer. He was able to elevate everyone's writing in the class. He has a great way with words. It was a great thing to be around him to learn about the structure of a sentence and the choices of words within it. Seeing how his mind worked and trying to emulate that in your writing - that's the point of coming to a program like this.
What elective courses did you take at Columbia outside of the Journalism School?
I took a course on climate change in the Environmental Sciences department. It was about how society can respond to climate change and other environmental issues. The second course I took was on food science.
What memories do you have about the M.A. program experience?
I remember going to the American Museum of Natural History with our class and seeing the big dinosaur bone room there. I remember seeing these original fossils and being amazed to be in the same room with them. I remember we went with a professor of paleontology, Paul Olsen, to New Jersey to look through a cliffside for various fossils. That was really cool. At the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, we looked at this mud core - a tube that was submerged into the bottom of a lake to pull up all this mud. As you looked at the mud, you were going through time and you were able to see what was happening in the different periods of time in the past. It was cool to see these things in person because, when I've wound up reporting on things like ice cores, it's helpful to have seen first-hand what scientists are actually doing.
Did you publish any stories based on your assignments at Columbia?
There were two pieces published from my work at Columbia that ended up being really good clips for me later on. For Marguerite Holloway's class, we had to write a piece about science funding, which sounds like it should be boring. I was worried about it being boring, but I was able to find a story that I thought was really good and ended up executing it pretty well. It was about nuclear fusion energy and about how the U.S. government had aggressively funded it in the 1970s and 80s and how that funding had dissipated after that. It's a very complicated science that, if the U.S. government had funded it at the levels it had funded it early on, we still wouldn't have been able to achieve a fusion reactor that could power cities, but, at the very least, the U.S. basically stopped trying to do it in a really aggressive way. I was able to do a story about this and it was eventually published in the Huffington Post. Back then, they had an iPad magazine that was called Huffington, and my story was the cover story for it.
Another good piece was from the "Business of Media" class that I took with Bill Grueskin. At the end of the class, we had to do a profile of a media company. I did a profile of the podcasting company Gimlet Media. I did that for the class, and after I graduated, I got an internship in The New York Times' business section. I looked back at that old profile, and I realized that I could spin it into a new story--not about Gimlet specifically, but about the trend in the podcasting world of having a blurred line between advertising and editorial. I was able to rework the piece--incorporate other podcasting companies into it--and publish it. I was able to use those two clips later on in building my career.
Could you tell us about the postgraduate fellowship you had at Columbia Journalism School following the M.A. program?
Columbia Journalism School had a postgraduate energy and environmental reporting fellowship. The story that we were working on and what we eventually published was about ExxonMobil's research into climate change in the 1970s and the 1980s. They came to understand what the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases was having on the planet and how that stood in contrast to the work ExxonMobil did in the 1990s and the 2000s that emphasized the uncertainty of that science to the public either through themselves or through funding organizations that did that on their behalf. There was this contradiction that made for a good story. We did a large series about it. I was part of a team of many reporters who did that. That story, along with a similar series published around the same time from Inside Climate Change, helped spur the various state attorneys general to look into this issue too and, right now, the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general have taken ExxonMobil to court.
Do you have advice for experienced journalists who might be interested in getting specialized training in the M.A. program?
Science, whether it's climate science or any other type of science, is a difficult thing to report about. When I was at the Huffington Post and was thinking about doing the M.A. program, I found that writing about a scientific study was really daunting. For experienced journalists without a lot of experience in science, this program is excellent for giving you that grounding to be able to report on the work of scientists - how their work is funded, how their work is executed - that you wouldn't have gotten, or wouldn't have gotten so quickly, without the M.A. program.
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