ProPublica announced on Monday that climate reporters Alex Cuadros and Katie Worth will join its national team. Cuadros will be investigating not only how people are experiencing climate change but also how decisions by individuals, industries and governments are shaping life-and-death outcomes. He will start in June. Starting today, Worth is joining the newsroom for one year to work on a special project on climate and higher education.
“By bringing on Alex and Katie, ProPublica is boosting our commitment to rigorous coverage of climate change that holds leaders and corporations to account,” Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica editor-at-large, said. “Alex is a thoughtful writer and a dogged investigator of how big business and wealth affect the environment. Katie is a gifted storyteller with a unique understanding of how climate messaging — and education — have been manipulated toward misleading ends.”
Cuadros recently published his second book, “When We Sold God’s Eye,” a story of the Cinta Larga, an indigenous tribe in the Amazon that had no contact with the outside world until the 1960s, when loggers and prospectors moved into their world. To tell the tragic tale of what happened to the Cinta Larga people, Cuadros spent six years in immersive reporting, including 10 extended trips into the jungle to conduct hundreds of interviews with the remaining members of the tribe. It’s a finalist for the California Book Awards.
His first book, “Brazillionaires,” was a Financial Times best book of 2016 and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. The book stemmed from Cuadros’ reporting at Bloomberg News, where he spent just over two years in São Paulo, Brazil, covering billionaires. Prior to that, he was a freelancer in Bogotá, Colombia.
Cuadros has written about the Amazon for The New York Times Magazine, evangelicals and drugs for Harper’s and the effects of drought in Brazil for The Atlantic.
“I’ve long admired ProPublica’s ability to tell stories that matter, and tell them well,” Cuadros said. “I’m grateful for the chance to help cover what I think is the most urgent issue of our time.”
Worth is the author of “Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America,” and her freelance work has appeared in Scientific American, The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others. Worth spent six years at Frontline, where she worked on ambitious projects including the mobile interactive project “The Virus at Sea,” and the climate investigation “Deflect, Delay, Defer.”
“ProPublica is the best in the business at the kind of reporting I most admire, focused on holding powerful people and entities accountable for the harm they often inflict on everyday people,” Worth said. “I am so excited to be joining such an excellent team.”
