For Michael Kodas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and senior editor at Inside Climate News, the problem isn’t that young people don’t care. It’s that the way climate is covered often makes them feel either numb or powerless.
“We’ve created a society built on distracting people,” Kodas said during Wednesday’s climate journalism event at USC Annenberg. “Everything is fighting for our attention.” The event drew a small crowd, but the low turnout created space for a more intimate, student-driven conversation, allowing attendees to engage Kodas with deeper questions.
In that attention war, climate stories lose twice: first to the algorithm, and then to despair.
Kodas argues that journalists haven’t always helped. Too often, climate coverage exposes what’s broken but doesn’t show readers what they can do to help.
“We’ve been good at exposing wrongdoing,” he said. “We haven’t always been good at giving people tools to feel like they can make even a small difference.”
Kodas suggested, for Gen Z, raised on a steady stream of breaking news and existential threats, that distinction matters. If every headline reads like the world is ending and nothing changes, checking out can feel like a form of self-preservation.
Rather than blaming young audiences for tuning out, Kodas says journalists need to rethink how they invite them in.
One of his core ideas is deceptively simple: start with characters.
“People want stories with characters,” he said. “Maybe the character is a scientist, a sea otter, a big-cat biologist or a person fighting a corporation. Once readers care about the character, they’ll follow you into the science.”
Kodas’ own career reflects that approach. He has trained and worked as a United States Forest Service firefighter, climbed Mount Everest to investigate crime on its slopes and crawled into a mountain lion den to report on human-wildlife conflict in Washington state.
He and a reporter documented how the state wildlife officials routinely killed mountain lions that attacked pets or livestock — even when the animals were raising kittens. After their work was published, the policy underwent a change.
“That’s a win,” he said. “You focus on the little contribution you can make with each story.”
That shift from “solve climate change” to “make one thing less harmful” is part of how he believes journalists can continue to cover such a heavy beat. It’s also how they might make the work feel actionable rather than abstract to Gen Z.
Graduate student Avidha Raha, who has reported on climate in India and also works as a photo editor for Annenberg Media, said the conversation reshaped her perspective on her own work.
“I’ve been doing climate stories mostly alone because I didn’t know how to reach out to resources,” she said. She has followed Kodas for years, but hearing him explain that even freelancers can bring in scientists and legal support changed something for her. “That gave me so much hope. I want to research more about how to do climate stories in a team and not alone.”
Kodas believes that reaching students like Raha begins with meeting them where they already are.
“We need to meet our audiences where they are,” he said. “It’s unfair to expect them to come find us because we think our way is the ‘right’ way. We have to bring our standards into the landscape where young people already are.”
For Gen Z, that landscape looks less like a front page and more like a For You Page: TikTok explainers, Instagram carousels, YouTube essays and creators who blend humor with hard truths. Kodas doesn’t suggest chasing trends, but he is adamant that accuracy and depth can live in those spaces if journalists experiment with form.
Early in his career, Kodas was laughed at for suggesting that newsrooms create a climate beat. Today, Inside Climate News employs reporters across multiple climate specialties, from agriculture to public health.
“Every beat can be a climate beat,” he said. Fashion, business, sports, cosmetics and housing all intersect with the atmosphere — and Gen Z is already thinking about those intersections, whether in terms of sustainability or identity.
For overwhelmed young journalists, he suggests narrowing their focus.
“You’re never going to be able to understand all of climate,” he said. “Pick the area where you think you can have the most impact, or the area that’s most interesting to you, and go deep.”
When asked directly why Gen Z should care about climate change, Kodas didn’t hesitate.
“Climate change is your future,” he said. “Are you going to be breathing wildfire smoke all the time? Are you going to have health problems? Are you going to lose property or loved ones? You have a huge influence over what that future looks like.”
Kodas doesn’t pretend journalism — or Gen Z — can halt the climate crisis alone. However, he believes that the stories they tell, and how they tell them, will shape how much harm is prevented and who gets heard along the way.