Earlier this year, two great environmental blogs shut down one after another: The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital and The Christian Science Monitor's Bright Green blog. While the WSJ didn't comment on why they shut their blog down, it might have been the result of the same challenges laid out in The Climate Desk's -- a joint collaboration between The Atlantic, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS' new public affairs show Need To Know -- introductory note:
Why? Well, climate change is slow-moving, vast, and often overwhelming for news organizations to grapple with, especially in a time of dwindling resources. What coverage there is tends to be compartmentalized—science, technology, politics, and business and covered by different teams or “desks," despite the intrinsic connections. Coverage is also too often fixated on imperiled wildlife, political gamesmanship, or the “debate” over the existence of climate change, all at the expense of advancing the bigger story—how we're going to address, mitigate, or adapt to it.
Some of that is definitely true. Journalism tends to focus on the new. And as the authors Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein write in the inaugural blog post, environmental stories are really old. Many of the issues we face today were being discussed when Earth Day launched 40 years ago. We've solved the easiest problems, and now we face a really challenging, complex, and enormous one.
Eoin O'Carroll, who helped found and run the Bright Green blog, pointed to another part of the story. O'Carroll works as a Web producer for the newspaper, and his talents were stretched thin. Posting every day was a challenge. But at the same time, he was no longer sure environmental issues needed their own spot.
I sometimes worry that if you label something as environmental then you're limiting it, because what we're really talking about is . . . something that's absolutely necessary. We're approaching 10 billion people on the planet we really have no choice.
Every single person on the planet in theory ought to be interested in this. You're excluding a lot of people.
Maybe the new project has found a way to keep environmental issues from seeming marginalized. The entries will also appear on the major publications, so it seems like The Climate Desk will be another aggregator for those looking specifically for the issue.
-- Monica Potts
