Morro Bay city leaders say King Tides give ‘disconcerting’ preview of sea level rise
For the past two months, the Morro Bay Spyglass has been lucky enough to work on a joint piece with our local news network, KSBY. They reached out to us on November 20, 2019 as part of the News Literacy Project and their National News Literacy Week, a multi-day national initiative to improve students’ abilities to be responsible consumers of news. KSBY and other local news teams through their parent company, E.W. Scripps have taken part in this national movement. The entire journalism team was excited to start this new project, which was much larger in scope than our normal content.
Before winter break, Katherine Worsham, Assistant News Director of KSBY, came into our class to discuss ideas for the topic of our story. Lots of things were floated out: gun violence, LGBTQ+ issues, environmental problems. But we ended up deciding to focus our investigations on Sea Level Rise in relation to climate change and the effects it will have on our coastal community.
With the topic decided, the next step was to research. We split up the hundred odd pages of reading between us and focused on that over break. When we came back we checked bases and discussed the main points of each of our sections.
We brainstormed different angles to cover the piece from, and ended up with six separate articles to write. The KSBY team came into our class a few more times, exchanging research, interviews, and other information. A key part of the project was taking pictures of the king tide on the weekend of January 10th, which demonstrated what a higher tide than usual can look like.
Overall this entire experience was very interesting as a look into the professional opportunities for journalists on a local level. Our team was able to work together to manage the workload and deliver a product which will hopefully be informative and interesting as a look into the future of our area and what ramifications rising seas will have.
Aside from the six articles that we have published on our website, KSBY also worked on their own angles of the issue with a news broadcast aired on January 27th and an article of their own. Also in line with this is the planned takeover of KSBY’s Instagram by the Spyglass on Tuesday, January 28.
The Spyglass looks forward to more potential collaborations with KSBY in the future.
