Articles about increased rainfall in Mississippi River basin win international journalism award

A series of news stories that included contributions from The Gazette — about increased rainfall in the Mississippi River Basin, entitled “When It Rains” — has won the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Award for written short-form stories.

“This special series — the first of its kind by a new journalism collaboration named Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, which banded together local reporters from eight states — explores the diverse and widespread impacts of the ensuing deluge, on economies, infrastructure, agriculture, and more,” Covering Climate Now wrote last week in a news release.

“Judges were impressed by the collaboration’s initiative — journalists worked with data experts at Climate Central to analyze 50 years of rainfall patterns — and they applauded these pieces for going beyond the headlines to humanize an urgent story that threatens to grow worse.”

The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk found that average annual precipitation has increased by as much as 8 inches in much of the watershed in the past 50 years, raising urgent new questions about life in a wetter world.

The five-part multimedia series included reporting from The Gazette’s Erin Jordan, who wrote about how increased rainfall affects farming, and Brittney J. Miller, who wrote about how cities, including Cedar Rapids, have made room for a river.

Reporters scaled levees in Atchison, Mo., interviewed elders in Freeport, Ill., toured newly-relocated communities on the Kickapoo River in Wisconsin, talked with farmers in rural Minnesota and interviewed tribal members in Indiana. They crunched data and sourced archival imagery from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The desk also worked with journalism students at the University of Missouri Journalism School to gather community input through an online survey, which further shaped the series.

Covering Climate Now, based in New York City, was co-founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019. It collaborates with journalists and newsrooms, large and small, “to produce more informed and urgent climate stories …,” its website states.