Hi! My name is Jamie Kim and I am a rising sophomore in the civil/environmental engineering department. I am from a small town in northern Jersey called Leonia, which is about a little over an hour away from Princeton. At Princeton, I am part of the Daily Princetonian Design section and a Ringle tutor.
During the past 8 weeks this summer, I worked as a ProCes-Derian research Intern with CivicStory, which is a nonprofit news site that focuses on sustainability and civics. Their mission is to advance solutions-based news about citizens building healthy communities. With climate change growing worse and worse, environmental news is growing more important as it provides people, especially those who are the most vulnerable to environmental issues, with accurate and critical information on sustainability and the environment.
Through my internship, I researched how news outlets in New Jersey were reporting environmental news. In order to approach this question, I created a competitive analysis to compare how different news outlets were reporting news on sustainability action vs environmental issues or climate change. Since CivicStory focuses a lot on civics, I paid special attention to news reports on sustainability action, which encompasses how municipalities, campuses, and local people are making changes to help the environment. I’ve read numerous news articles from different news outlets, ranging from major private ones to smaller local nonprofit ones, and searched for any significant biases, common themes, and messages within these news articles.
As a component of the competitive analysis, I also conducted a sentiment analysis to analyze the emotions and attitudes within news articles, allowing me to also take a more data-related approach to answering the research question. This project will hopefully help CivicStory see where they can fill in the gaps in New Jersey coverage and help solidify and narrow down their role in New Jersey journalism among other similar news organizations.
Overall, this summer with CivicStory has been an amazing learning experience!
