Climate change through a local lens: Editorial considerations behind the coverage of climate change and extreme weather in local news outlets

Climate change journalism has often been criticized for being too complex, abstract, and detached in time and space, which may leave audiences disengaged. The present paper nuances this discussion by examining editorial considerations behind climate reporting in local and regional newsrooms with a specific focus on extreme weather. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews and a thematic analysis, the study explores how local media outlets integrate climate change into everyday reporting through recurring coverage of weather and seasonal phenomena. The findings reveal a recurring editorial logic in which weather events are interpreted as part of longer-term climatic developments and not as isolated incidents. Building on the concept of seasonal journalism, the paper argues that seasonal journalism functions as a mechanism of temporal accumulation through which discrete weather events are transformed into evidence of environmental change over time. In doing so, the article extends existing research on local climate journalism by showing that its distinctive contribution lies not only in its embeddedness in place, but also in its embeddedness in temporal rhythms. By combining the local and the seasonal, the paper contributes to ongoing discussions about how journalism renders climate change observable and meaningful in everyday life.