{"id":345720,"date":"2021-06-09T06:05:12","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T20:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=345720"},"modified":"2021-06-09T06:05:12","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T20:05:12","slug":"ramirez-joins-cnns-climate-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/ramirez-joins-cnns-climate-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramirez joins CNN\u2019s Climate Team"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Rachel Ramirez joins the CNN Climate team as a newswriter\/reporter in New York this week. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Saipan Southern High School alumna Rachel Ramirez is the newest addition to CNN\u2019s Climate Team as a writer and reporter, and she hopes to draw on her experience when Typhoon Soudelor devastated the CNMI in 2015 to tell more stories about climate impacts on vulnerable communities.<\/p>\n

Being from the CNMI, which is geographically in waters considered a typhoon highway, environment, and climate issues remain close to Ramirez\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story I like to tell folks is that I got into journalism because of a climate disaster. When Typhoon Soudelor came barreling toward the Marianas in 2015 while I was away for college and I lost contact with my family, I felt helpless. No major national news outlet covered the typhoon until it reached mainland Asia. I remember writing an amateur news report and submitting it to CNN\u2019s iReport platform, which never got published but it still gave the URL, which I shared on Facebook and was quickly widely shared. I was determined to tell stories about vulnerable communities then,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Ramirez believes that telling climate change stories is not only about disasters like typhoons, hurricanes, or wildfires. \u201cIt\u2019s also about an oil and gas or plastics company releasing harmful pollutants into the air next to a predominantly Black community in Louisiana or a waste incinerator or landfill setting up shop next to a large immigrant community in New Jersey. It\u2019s also about historically marginalized Black neighborhoods suffering more from extreme heat compared to White neighborhoods, because they lack community investments like green parks and trees that cool the air. Understanding these intersectionalities are crucial to climate conversations,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

In March, CNN announced that it is building a climate team that will focus on climate and environment news. In a memo written by CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker, he said they are formalizing and expanding their climate coverage with a dedicated force.<\/p>\n

Ramirez explained that the CNN Climate Team is a new initiative within CNN\u2019s News and Digital platform, in recognition of the evolving conversation related to climate change\u2014from being purely scientific to being about its causes and effects on communities. \u201cMany people, particularly CNN\u2019s audience, don\u2019t really understand that climate change affects all aspects of life and issues from immigration to economy as well as housing,\u201d she said \u201cMy job is to make the audience understand that there\u2019s more to climate science and that climate change is a crisis that touches all social issues and needs to be addressed immediately, because it\u2019s affecting the most vulnerable populations. My job is to deliver impact journalism about climate change by telling stories of communities and scientific breakthroughs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ramirez was a curious young girl who was always reading and writing. \u201cI always loved writing. \u2026I would write little poems, songs, prose here and there, but I didn\u2019t necessarily think I was good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ramirez had lived in both the Philippines and Saipan and was immersed in the Tagalog and Ilocano languages there and then back to English when on Saipan. \u201cHaving to code-switch and navigate both languages and being told by teachers to \u2018fix my accent\u2019 were difficult for me. It definitely affected me, so I wanted to prove them otherwise through writing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her favorite classes at Saipan Southern High were English classes, specifically AP Literature and AP Language. She has fond memories of her English teachers, Paul Miura and Jonathan Aguon, whom she credits with playing big roles in her journey.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember Mr. Aguon would give us journal entries and make us learn difficult AP vocabulary words, which I find myself using until this day. During my 18th birthday\u2026I remember [Mr. Aguon] giving me a simple purple composition notebook that I brought with me to college. Though I\u2019m not exactly sure where it went, I\u2019m pretty certain it\u2019s filled with my writings,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Ramirez graduated from the University of Portland where she majored in Communication Studies with a focus on Journalism and a minor in French Studies. This environment helped pave the way to a career in journalism. \u201cI started out as a student journalist at University of Portland\u2019s campus newspaper called The Beacon. While at The Beacon, I also had internships at local news publications in Portland, including the Oregon Business Magazine and the Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly newspaper Willamette Week,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Before landing a job at CNN, Ramirez was freelancing and it was her entry into the Grist fellowship program that brought her into the field of climate change and environmental justice. \u201c\u2026 My secret dream is to write a climate or historical fiction book one day based on all the stories I\u2019ve heard or maybe simply a memoir about my life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her foray into the world of reporting is not without a hint of a crusade, with Ramirez acutely aware of the overall state of mainstream journalism in terms of diversity and media representation.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach time I step into a newsroom since I started my career, I was always surrounded by white journalists\u2014never anyone that looked like me\u2014a woman journalist of color who came from a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. Without journalists of color, how else will our stories be told accurately? Who will tell the true story of the forced removal of Native Americans from their lands without Native journalists? The surge of pandemic-related anti-Asian violence without Asian journalists? The massive pollution coming out of oil and gas refineries that\u2019s causing Black Americans to suffer from cancer and other respiratory illnesses without Black journalists? I want to be that person I was looking for when I first stepped into journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saipan Southern High School alumna Rachel Ramirez is the newest addition to CNN\u2019s Climate Team…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":345722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[4176],"class_list":["post-345720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-cnn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}