What climate journalism means heading into a 1.5 C world

Five charts and fifty-five opinions about the state of the field, and where it is going.

Working on a story while sitting on the floating ice shelf of Petermann Glacier, Greenland, in 2016. Photo by Whitney Shefte.

Nearly ten years ago while working for The Washington Post, I took a trip to the far reaches of Greenland. I was accompanying a small research team on a data rescue mission — a quest to recover ocean temperature readings that would ultimately cast light on the fate of Petermann Glacier, one of the biggest gateways where ice can flow out of the world’s second largest ice sheet and drive rising seas.

In all of this, I was doing climate journalism. In this rather ambitious form, it involved extensive travel and teamwork. I went to Greenland with a video journalist, Whitney Shefte, and after we returned, journalists skilled in cartography and online design contributed further to the work (as, of course, did editors). It all resulted in a major multimedia, narrative story.

I mention all this now because I’ve been attempting to survey the state of climate journalism roughly 10 years later. That Greenland story came at a time when some major U.S. media outlets were starting to ramp up their capacity to take on ambitious work of this type. And there have been some great results, but it is also clear climate journalism still has many gaps and challenges.

Now is a good time to take stock, because another important change appears to be underway. Nonprofit, often collaborative journalism models are trying to pool efforts and expand climate coverage in domains where it has struggled — like local news.

What does it all mean?

I’ve been covering climate change in some form or other for some twenty years. Overall, I think a lot of great work has been done — and that you can say the field has grown and matured. But with the crossing of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold looming, there will, inevitably, be much more work to do.

What follows is my attempt to lay out where we are now, some history of how we got here, and a bit about where everything may be heading. It is hardly comprehensive, and very much shaped by my newspaper background, and my U.S. perspective. Much has been written about additional aspects that I won’t be able to get into here — objectivity and the proper role of an environmental or climate journalist, the frames used in stories, the handling of scientific evidence, the demographics of who’s doing the coverage, audience side data, the personal toll on journalists who cover this subject, and more. Nor can I do justice to how coverage is faring outside of the U.S. Still, having this post as a baseline will help me go deeper in many additional areas in the future.

With that said, here’s what we know:

Major U.S. newspaper climate coverage has grown considerably in the last 20 years

The first big point to understand is one that I’ve already alluded to. Namely, there’s been a noteworthy increase in climate coverage at the leading five U.S. newspapers (though also, possibly, a small decline recently).

Max Boykoff at the University of Colorado and his colleagues have been tracking this for quite some time now. Here’s what their data show:

This chart feels like my life. I remember back in the early 2000s, when stem cells, evolution, and climate change were all competing to be the top science story. Coverage levels, measured here as any mention of the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in these five papers, were fairly low in that era.

But since then, attention has exploded. This likely reflects a combination of two things. First, there’s been a concerted effort at major outlets like The New York Times, the AP, and The Washington Post (where, again, I worked for nearly 10 years) to increase coverage. But the salience of the issue also grew — so climate change also gets mentioned more frequently in op-eds, business coverage, etc.

This isn’t limited to U.S. major papers. In a recent international survey of environmental journalists, 77 percent of respondents believed their media organization was producing “more stories” than a decade ago.

There also seems to be a long term growth in television news coverage in the U.S., though this appears more volatile, and may show a falling off lately. (The question of whether the 2024 presidential season and the early months of the Trump administration may be leading to lower coverage levels is intriguing, but this requires much more analysis.)

Environmental journalism’s historic dependence on print media

That large newspapers have recently invested in climate coverage isn’t all that surprising when you consider the history of the environmental beat, with which the climate beat has fused (or, maybe, which it has taken over). The modern beat is only about half a century old, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s (for a great historical account, see Mark Neuzil’s essay here).

In 2008, we get a key study that takes the pulse of the activity and lays down a crucial marker. It was the result of years of work in the early 2000s by the researchers David Sachsman, James Simon, and JoAnn Valenti. They undertook an exhaustive survey of journalists covering the environment at newspapers and television stations across the U.S., and located 686 of them, of whom they ultimately interviewed 95 percent! (Final publication here.)

On of the major findings was that these journalists were not uniformly employed throughout the media industry. Rather, only 36.5 percent of daily newspapers “had at least one environment reporter.” Naturally, it was the larger publications that tended to employ them (and, to employ more than one). The percentage was far lower for television stations. Here, it was only 10 percent.

So, it appears that circa 2000-2005, environmental journalism could hardly be called an institutional standard in U.S. media. And, it was far more dependent on print media, and larger print publications in general.

And something big was about to happen.

Since the Great Recession, many jobs shifted online and to freelance

By 2010 JoAnn Valenti, one of the study authors, suspected many of these print environmental reporting jobs had been lost. “They didn’t realize they were in the golden age,” Valenti told Yale Climate Connections at the time.

That’s because newspaper jobs began to shrink rapidly at around this time. I’ve shared this data series, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before, but I think this is perhaps an interesting new way of visualizing it:

Some data from the Society of Environmental Journalists confirm the field changed dramatically as newspaper jobs withered. Circa 2019, the society reported that the largest single group of its members, representing 29.6 percent overall, consisted of freelance writers — a major increase in this category since the Great Recession.

It’s not like the content vanished, of course. There’s been a big growth in online publications, including specialty publications that focus on the topic — E&E News, Grist, Inside Climate News, Carbon Brief and numerous others. There’s climate journalism here on Substack.

Some data from a vast 2022 Pew survey of U.S. journalists reaffirms that environmental coverage remains very much alive, but is also only a small portion of all coverage. Eight percent of reporters, commentators, and bloggers interviewed said they cover the “environment and energy” in a “typical month.”

“There’s no shortage of places to look for climate change news,” noted Mark Neuzil, a professor at the University of St. Thomas who studies environmental journalism and its history. “If you want to learn about it, you can find a credible source. It could be a super narrow subject, but, it’s probably being covered by somebody at a digital outlet somewhere who’s really a specialist.”

But what about those not served by the major papers — or those not already climate change aficionados who know where to find what they are looking for online?

Local newspapers cover climate very differently — and less overall

Remember, we’re here talking about outlets that would likely have had fewer (or no) environmental journalists even before the era of major newspaper layoffs began. And, those that lost perhaps the most in that era.

“Where resources are tight, climate coverage often suffers,” said John Schwartz, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin who previously covered climate change for the New York Times. “You’re not likely to have a dedicated climate reporter in a small newsroom, and a general reporter might be intimidated by the idea of talking to scientists or writing a story involving science, physics and other technical disciplines without pulling a correction.”

So, it’s no surprise to find that there’s less attention to climate change in these local papers. In a revealing study published last year in Climatic Change, Parker Bolstad and David Victor found that while “Elite” and so-called “Heartland” newspapers both increased their coverage of climate change over the last decade or so, elite newspapers increased it much more.

Here’s one way of visualizing the growing disparity:

The salience of the issue has surely risen at local outlets as well — but that doesn’t mean they have the staffing to reflect that. “You have scattered, local or regional outlets that have a widely varying degree of capacity to cover these issues,” said Meaghan Parker, the executive director of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and former executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

The types of stories covered are also likely to be pretty different as you transition from the national to local level.

Eric Freedman heads the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University, and also its Capital News Service, which puts out statewide content (including environmental stories). As an example of the type of climate reporting that works in local coverage, Freedman pointed to a recent story about what warming in the winter season means for Michigan agriculture, such as the state’s cherry industry. This kind of piece is successful because of its clear local relevance, Freedman explained.

A successful local story can be “relevant in the context, in the sourcing, it could even be relevant in just the data,” Freedman said. So it might quote local experts, or present data down to the county level. But it’ll have a distinctive local touch.

The climate data journalism revolution

So some big changes I’ve seen in my career are these: The major loss of newspaper reporting jobs (including for environmental coverage), the big counter-burst of major newspaper climate change coverage in the past 5 to 10 years or so, and the large growth of online climate content.

But there’s yet another change that I’d like to highlight. It’s the turn to data reporting, which has a vast amount to offer in this field, where data are everywhere. And it appears data-focused journalists are taking note.

For three years now, the European Journalism Centre, which also runs the website DataJournalism.com, has been surveying an international cadre of data journalists about their field and practices. These journalists are reached through DataJournalism.com and its various offshoots, including a Slack Channel, a LinkedIn group, and a podcast. The survey asks the journalists all manner of questions, but one is about their beats — more specifically, “What does your journalistic work cover?” Journalists are allowed to give more than one answer to this question.

Here’s how these data-focused reporters answered the question in the years 2021, 2022, and 2023:

This pulse of interest is striking, but it’s important to emphasize that data journalism projects are time consuming and resource intensive. There’s reason to doubt the climate data journalism expansion at large publications has been matched in smaller ones. So this is where a lot of innovation can occur.

The future

I’m happy to have been part of the expansion of climate coverage on a national level. But the story of telling this story is certainly not over.

The next frontier seems to be bringing the new wave of climate journalism (and climate data journalism) beyond larger outlets where it is already institutionalized. That may mean to specialized online publications that can find new ways of reaching audiences. And it may mean to smaller, regional or local newspapers and other media outlets, which may not otherwise have the resources to provide it. It likely means non-profit journalism models, as for profit newspapers continue to struggle.

This is where we’re seeing a lot of the energy right now, such as in the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, recent giving by the MacArthur Foundation, and Climate Central’s Partnership Journalism program. And most recently, we’ve also seen an announcement of a new big collaboration called the Climate News Task Force, which is intended to pool resources and find ways to expand coverage.

The task force is “an effort to get news outlets together to say, what are the barriers and what are some ways we can work together collectively to identify the gaps, find the resources to fill them,” said Parker, who is helping to lead the initiative.

What does this additional work look like? Let’s hope that it’s going to be about more than just upping the total number of articles produced.

Past thinking about climate journalism has come from “the underlying, sometimes stated, sometimes not stated premise that more is better,” said Jill Hopke, a professor of communication at DePaul University. “In the last few years we’ve seen more of a shift to conversations and research into quality of coverage.”

Quality can have many meanings, and we won’t be able to provide a full roadmap here. Hopke’s research offers one part of the answer: It has documented a big gap in how different media outlets cover climate change, with elite or climate focused outlets more likely to bring the subject up in the context of heatwaves and wildfires.

Others would say quality means talking about climate solutions. On a local level, quality to me means capturing directly relevant impacts in a particular place with a high level of specificity. In some locations, of course, there’s going to be substantial disagreement about the science and policies related to climate change. A core challenge will be finding out how to cover the topic in ways that allows journalists to speak across such divides.

I believe quality today is also inevitably going to mean working with data — now, often, local climate data.

In the end, climate and environmental journalism have gone through many challenges and transformations, but are very much still with us. And I don’t have any doubt this will continue. The world is getting extremely close to crossing 1.5C of warming above preindustrial levels. The impacts of climate change will only escalate from here, meaning there will continue to be many relevant, and resonant, stories to tell about what this means globally and locally.

We’ve also seen here that employment of environment and climate journalists, at least outside of a few major outlets, is very fragile. That was true even before we entered an environment in which podcasters and YouTubers and Substackers have the influence and audiences that they have today.

There’s no doubt these voices will be increasingly important and influential. Obviously, I see a value in this platform, or I wouldn’t be writing this in this form.

But I also see the value of journalistic institutions, and don’t think they’re fully replaceable. The institutions bring independence and accountability. The editors bring quality control and standards. The colleagues bring good ideas. Steady jobs bring the capacity to learn, grow, and focus on larger, more ambitious work. Budgets support traveling, investigating, and big data projects — and in the end, it all generates quality new information that would not otherwise exist.

I think again back to that Greenland story. It took a lot of time just to identify the story and plan the trip. Then, I was at Petermann glacier in August of 2016. The data that the scientists retrieved was analyzed by October, and we ended the story by revealing what it showed. Then, we did not publish until the very end of the year. So I easily spent half a year working on it (though of course I was doing many other things at the time). And that is not the longest running project I worked on.

If you want dedicated and thoughtful climate journalism, you need to create space for reporters to invest the time, as well as the structures that let them do their work better because they’re not alone — they’re supported. I know that it flies in the face of many of the trends in the media right now. That doesn’t make it any less essential.