About

Mary Catherine O’Connor is an award-winning reporter whose beats include climate change, energy, material circularity, waste, technology, and recreation. She was a 2022-23 Audio Academy Fellow at KALW Public Media in San Francisco. She has reported for leading publications including Outside, The Guardian, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Pacific Standard, and Wired. She has collected dispatches from climbers ascending Everest, and interviewed some of the world’s most accomplished athletes, technologists, and entrepreneurs.

Previously, she was the editorial director for Activate, a nonprofit that empowers science entrepreneurs to bring their research to market to address climate change and other global crises.

Beginning in 2014 she cultivated a new beat: reporting on microfiber pollution, which includes synthetic fibers shed from textiles, tires, plastic packaging, and other sources.

In 2014, O’Connor co-founded an ad-free, reader-supported experiment in journalism, called Climate Confidential. Reporter Alexis C. Madrigal said this about the project: “They’re a journalistic supergroup who have formed their own subscription news organization… They are all brilliant reporters.”

From 2015 until 2017 she edited the trade magazine Internet of Things Journal, a resource for businesspeople looking to understand how Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can help their company to be more efficient, flexible and responsive and to create smart products for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets.

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