Anna Robertson and Dave Finocchio each boast impressive media careers.
She’s held executive roles at ABC and Yahoo News. “I was Diane Sawyer’s producer for many years, and I covered the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 and the tsunami of Asia,” said Robertson. The list goes on.
He’s a media tech startup veteran. “I previously founded and was the CEO of Bleacher Report, the sports media company,” said Finocchio.
Bleacher Report, a website that focuses on sport and sports culture, was founded in 2005 and recently earned 3.5 billion engagements according to its website. It collects a wide range of sports-related sources in order to offer a curated range of information for all sports fans, from the NFL to the NBA to the MLB.
Robertson and Finocchio have each seen extraordinary success, but there was something that leveled the playing field. Climate change.
Like anybody else, the two started to see their lives affected as climate change amplified the wildfire danger in California, already a natural part of the ecology.
“I had been evacuated from wildfires in the middle of the night with my kids. We had friends who lost their home to wildfires. We couldn’t send our kids to school because the air quality was so bad. So I saw the impacts of extreme weather on my own family,” said Robertson of her time living in Los Angeles.
Finocchio has a similar story.
“I was in San Fransisco for a long time. Our first real wildfire/smoke season was in 2014 and then happened again in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and that was sort of the era where I decided that I wanted to figure out something,” he said.
Rather than ignoring a need they saw right under their noses — a helpful, practical resource for individuals to navigate a changing world due to climate — Finocchio, now based in Bend, Oregon, and Robertson, living in Park City, joined forces with Ryan Alberti and decided to act.
In July 2022, The Cool Down, a self-proclaimed mainstream climate brand, was born. This media site is designed to be a guide, providing a more-hopeful perspective on climate needs. It aims to marry climate news with people’s individual interests, to show that sustainable choices are accessible.
The website spells out their mission: “We believe the best is still to come in the years ahead, and we want to connect you to the cleaner, cooler future with stories and tips you’re not getting anywhere else.”
For the three co-founders, the idea for The Cool Down came from years of paying attention.
Robertson had noticed that the most important topic for local news consumers was weather. But, while the interest was there, the strategy for delivering climate news just wasn’t working.
Finocchio agreed. They both used the phrase “doom-and-gloom” to describe the state of climate coverage — To them, that just wasn’t going to work.
“It was just too difficult. … It’s just been really hard for people. People are busy, they don’t all have the time to do a lot of research on their own,” said Finocchio.
The Cool Down offers something different.
“We’re focused on trying to help people with actionable solutions as best as possible, without telling them that they need to make sacrifices or telling them that the sky is falling. And I think that message is more helpful for people and is more digestible,” said Finocchio.
The Cool Down has been widely distributed on Yahoo and Apple News and MSN, says Robertson, and in the past year, the site has grown to reach 25 million users each month. Finocchio said his work with the Bleacher Report was a major guide for constructing this successful platform.
“A lot of the challenge building a company like this is really understanding how to create content that resonates with real people. … What was the value proposition for consumers, why does it matter to them? To understand demographically which people in which areas cared most about the story,” he said.
Robertson said that this involves creating content around a variety of topics, incorporating climate topics with people’s “passion points,” from gardening to tech to cars, or in a recent article, turning laundry wastewater into drinkable beer.
“My perspective is that, the more we are real about how we in the United States actually respond to things, the more you can use data to figure out — OK, the person who lives in the coastal city who’s super liberal, these are the things that work for them. Let’s be real about that. The conservative person who lives in Arkansas and has this worldview, these are the value propositions that that person cares about,” said Finocchio.
Changing climate is an issue that is affecting everyone, the two said. But Robertson and Finocchio believe change will begin by engaging individuals on their own terms.
“We actually have all the technology we need to solve this issue. We just need people to get behind it,” said Robertson.
“This is the hard work that has to be done. You have to meet people where they are, and you have to line up solutions that meet their worldview,” said Finocchio.
This grassroots approach is a perspective that motivates Robertson in her day-to-day life, as well. With The Cool Down launched and seeing success, she could have left it there. But instead she continues to practice what she preaches, namely through local outreach in her Park City home.
As a mother of young kids, she decided to get plugged in at the public schools.
“I just kind of got curious with what our elementary school was doing at Jeremy Ranch Elementary, started asking the principal there if he would be open to creating a Green Team and bringing a composting program to the school,” she said.
In partnership with the school and EATS Park City, Robertson helped create a lunchtime composting program funded by Park City Community Foundation through their climate fund. It has since diverted over 30,000 pounds of food waste from the school’s cafeteria, said Robertson.
“I’m now the co-president of the Jeremy Ranch PTO and we really think about sustainability through the lens of everything we do,” she said. “We use reusable cups, we compost all the food at our events. … For Halloween we’re doing pumpkin composting and candy wrapper collection, so it really has become part of the fabric of our school.”
Communities need to come together and face the problem head on for the greatest impact, she said. And in Park City, she’s in good company.
“I think you see that playing out in Park City as a microcosm, because we have a lot of incredible organizations and people focused on climate solutions. And there’s a ton of momentum around people’s individual choices, making changes.”
In addition to the schools, Robertson has gotten involved with groups like EATS, Recycle Utah and Mountain Towns 2030, and she’s helped create a sustainability council along with Park City High School’s Green Team, which meets quarterly to talk about sustainability issues.
On the individual level, Robertson and her family have incorporated sustainable choices in their own home, like having solar panels, a heat pump hot water heater, replacing windows and insulation, composting, using native plants and drought tolerant landscaping and driving electric cars.
For Robertson and her family, Park City is home and she’s determined to protect it.
“Part of what drew me to Park City is the surroundings and the focus on nature …. You can’t help but think about our planet — I think there’s a real reverence for the planet, being here in such a beautiful place — and it reminds us that we need and want to protect it.” she said.