Newsreel’s News and Brews #0: Covering the Environment When the Data Disappears
News and Brews #0: Trump and Nature: Covering the Environment When the Data Disappears
📅 Monday, June 8 · 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Overview
News and Brews is a phone-free night where a working journalist reads their best story out loud, gets interviewed about how they actually reported it, and takes your questions over a drink. No screens, no scrolling, no feed. Just the story behind the story.
🎟️ Tickets: $15
🍺 Plus a 1-drink minimum at the bar
📵 Phones away the whole night
🎙️ Speaker: Marlowe Starling (National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN)
📰 The story: Inside the Effort to Save Hundreds of Environmental Datasets Purged Under Trump (Forbes)
In November 2024, weeks after the election, a group of environmental data scientists realized something alarming: hundreds of critical federal datasets were about to disappear. One of them, Jessie Mahr, decided to do something about it.
Over the next three months, Mahr led the most coordinated effort in the country to archive federal environmental data before it vanished — flood-risk maps, water-quality tools, air-pollution indicators, the records communities, companies, and agencies rely on. Days after the inauguration, the databases started going offline. Her team had already saved them. As of last fall, they'd archived 362 datasets and counting.
Marlowe Starling reported the whole thing for Forbes. At News and Brews #1, she'll read from her story, take us inside how she found and told it, and we'll get into the bigger questions: What happens to the environment beat when the data starts disappearing? Who decides what the public gets to see? And what does it take to report a story that's still unfolding?
Then we'll put it to the room. Expect news trivia, a live audience Q&A, and time to actually talk to each other afterward.
About Marlowe
Marlowe Starling is a freelance environmental journalist covering climate, conservation, coastlines, and science. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, Forbes, Mongabay, Quanta Magazine, and Sierra Magazine. She holds a master's in science journalism from NYU and a bachelor's in journalism and wildlife ecology from the University of Florida. She's currently an environmental journalism fellow with the Safina Center and a science writing fellow with Quanta Magazine.
Why phone-free?
Newsreel exists because the algorithmic feed broke how we understand the world. News and Brews is the opposite of the feed: one story, told well, in a room full of people who put their phones down to hear it. Come find out what that feels like again.
Agenda
6:30 PM — Doors open. Grab a drink, find a seat, phones away.
6:55 PM — Welcome from Jack Brewster, founder of Newsreel
7:00 PM — Marlowe reads from her reporting
7:15 PM — Jack interviews Marlowe: the story behind the story
7:40 PM — Audience Q&A
7:55 PM — Trivia
8:15 PM — Mingle, meet Marlowe, grab one more round