CBS News And Stations To Create Data Journalism, Climate Initiatives

Adrienne Roark, president of content development and integration, CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures, today told staffers of new operations including:

• Creating a data journalism team, bringing together the in-house meteorologists and weather teams across CBS News and Stations to drive collaboration and innovation around local, national and global coverage of weather and climate stories.
• Hiring a head of weather strategy and operations for CBS News and Stations.
• Hiring a head of climate coverage for CBS News and Stations.

In her internal memo, she said: “I am pleased to announce the creation of a Data Journalism Team to support and serve our journalists and storytellers moving forward. By combining traditional reporting with open-sourcing, statistics, and visualization, we will be able to provide more impactful and interactive stories. The Data Journalism Team — made up of people with diverse skills and experiences in advanced data reporting — will work as one, serving our entire News and Stations organization across every time zone.

“We will be hiring a head of data journalism to lead this effort. The current stations data journalists will join this team and continue working closely with their stations and the Lab. We will also be adding several more positions to build out this team in the coming weeks. Our goal is to create illustrative, interactive stories and investigations that are differentiators, break ground by inventing new tools in newsgathering and content distribution, and prioritize research and development of emerging technologies.”

She continued: “Weather is often the most important content we provide local and national audiences. From life-impacting to life-threatening weather, audiences turn to us for a sense of community connection, context, and clarity. Add in extreme weather events that are worse and more frequent, having best-in-class weather and climate coverage is now more important than ever.

“As such, we are creating a central team dedicated to bringing together our current 60-plus meteorologists, weather teams and storytellers to drive collaboration and innovation. We will be hiring a head of weather strategy & operations to lead this effort, as well as other multi-skilled positions. And we will continue to work with our partners at The Weather Channel to leverage the very best of what they do.

“We will also be hiring a head of climate coverage to develop and coordinate with our climate correspondents and this new central weather team. We’ve already started to collaborate on this very important topic, with the network and stations teams meeting to share notes and ideas. The new head of climate coverage will supercharge this collaboration and lead us in creating a powerful and unified team.

“We excited to bring together these teams and work even more closely. Data, weather, and climate are just the start. Working closely with Chad Cross, David Reiter, Matt Mosk and others, we will build out more signature content verticals. More on that in the very near future.”

Roark concluded: “By integrating and working together as one, we will be able to experiment, evolve, and explore new opportunities across the organization and further our mission: report the truth, hold the powerful accountable, and tell memorable and relevant stories that truly serve our audiences when they need us most.”