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The timing was just right when Judith LaVoie attended Metcalf Institute\u2019s 2013 Pacific Northwest Climate Change Seminar for Journalists in Seattle. After covering the environment and First Nations stories for the Times Colonist in Victoria, British Columbia, for more than 20 years, LaVoie was embarking on a new career as a freelance journalist. She says she left Metcalf\u2019s seminar armed with great new sources, renewed confidence, and six notebooks jammed packed with story ideas.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could listen to the various speakers and say, I can get story out of that,\u201d said LaVoie. \u201cIt was a great experience and a wonderful transition for me. It really helped me cement a lot of ideas about future stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
LaVoie says the seminar also gave her something editors were hungry for at the time as she searched for freelance jobs \u2013 the ability to hit the ground running on an issue of growing importance to their readers. \u201cWhen I put feelers out to magazines, everyone wanted stories about climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n
An award-winning journalist, LaVoie has covered a wide range of issues throughout her career for newspapers in Canada, Cyprus, England, and in the Middle East. However, she says getting people to read about climate change, and finding ways to illustrate how the changing climate is impacting the lives of her readers, is no small feat.<\/p>\n
\u201cTrying to find a hook and connect it to people so that they\u2019ll say, \u2018this is important, I better read it\u2019 is difficult,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd finding that hook without being sensational, that\u2019s going to make a good lead, is also challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n
LaVoie wrote about the difficulty journalists face when attempting to engage their news audiences on climate change topics and \u201cwhere hope for change lies\u201d in a story for Focus Online entitled The Climate Challenge. \u201cWhile stories of homes and communities destroyed by floods, or stories of death from heat waves, or those about displaced animals inevitably grab public attention, connect the dots to climate change, and interest drops to a polite yawn,\u201d she stated.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s currently working on an eight-part series for DeSmog Canada about the proposed Jumbo Glacier Resort, a development project in British Columbia near three glaciers that faces a mountain of opposition from environmental groups. Lavoie says she expects to apply the knowledge she gained from the Metcalf Institute seminar as she reports on this controversial project.<\/p>\nRead More Alumni Profiles<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The timing was just right when Judith LaVoie attended Metcalf Institute\u2019s 2013 Pacific Northwest Climate Change Seminar for Journalists in Seattle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2195,"featured_media":9457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[51,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alum-hp","category-alumni-reporting"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2195"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4208"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24044,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208\/revisions\/24044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/metcalf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}