About

Mary Catherine O’Connor is an audio producer and reporter whose beats include climate, energy, petrochemicals, waste, technology, and recreation. She produces the Columbia Energy Exchange and With Great Power podcasts and reports on climate for KALW Public Media in San Francisco, where she was a 2022-23 Audio Academy Fellow. She also reports on California climate policy for CEB News. Her print work has appeared in Outside, The Guardian, High Country News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Pacific Standard, and Wired, among many other publications.

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.

She was among the first reporters to cover microplastic pollution, with a particular focus 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 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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