The big problem with climate reporting right now

The media is adapting, but painfully slowly

The other day I was listening to a session from the World Editors Forum Global eSummit on Journalism and the Climate Crisis. At first I was ecstatic – the Global News Director of news agency AFP said that they decided a few years ago that climate needed to be part of a general focus on the future of the planet, and combine this focus across news desks. As I’ve said in previous blogs we need to have a climate perspective in the media, and make it a concern across all reporting. At first this work by AFP sounded exactly like what we need, and something that is happening already.

Then I was shocked. The AFP editor, Phil Chetwynd, said that “2020 was a lost year” for climate reporting as science reporters focused on the coronavirus instead.

It got me thinking. Of course science reporters wanted to focus on the pandemic – but this loss of climate coverage puts the finger on the main problem with climate coverage these days. It tends to be based on projects, on separate desks, and on special reporters, often with a connection to the science reporters. But it has to be more than something special that gets dropped when a big story happens.

Did reporting on economic and business matters stop during the pandemic? Did crime reporting stop? Did we stop thinking about issues of racism and misogyny? The climate perspective has to be just as obvious and unspoken as these perspectives, so it does not get dropped as soon as something big happens.

The participants in the panel also made the point again and again that climate reporting needs to draw in new funds. It demands lots of travelling, and is an expense. This is also a sign of how climate reporting is currently seen as a special cost; it’s an add-on and hence it is quick to be dropped when money gets tight. And money is tight across the entire media right now! This is another reason why climate coverage can’t be something separate, it has to be smoothed into all reporting and be just as present as thinking about politics, economics and discrimination.

Climate reporting needs to be present when a journalist re-writes wire copy, in the same way it is present when a special reporter makes a trip to the Arctic. Climate journalism has to also be allowed to be ‘boring’ rather than something that journalists do based on the carrot of getting to go on a glamourous reporting journey.

Climate change isn’t a topic, it’s an era that we’re living through. What we need is to make climate reporting urgent and easy for all reporters, including the new or precarious reporter who is working on an everyday beat. We cannot leave it to special projects or special reporters. This is also the solution to the money problem. We need to stop thinking about how to fund climate journalism separately and instead simply see it as part of our existing output.

Something that Phil Chetwynd from AFP said was really hopeful, he said this project there is part of a ‘cultural change’ at AP. Because cultural change is exactly what we need. He also said that reporters seem to be in the middle of personal cultural change, in that more of those covering the climate summit COP26 took the train, so that kind of awareness and joining up the lines for journalists is happening.

Ritu Kapur at The Quint also said something that points to another weakness with the current model of climate reporting – that their metrics showed not many people read their first series of climate stories. Their response to this was to craft another series of climate stories that would be more relevant. But it seems to me that since climate is an urgent story of our era, just as urgent as covid, that we need to simply make it present as a factor in all news, rather than making specific climate stories and trying different ways to get people to read them.

But this is difficult; there are institutional barriers to news organisations changing. We cannot wait for all other news desks to embrace climate; many foreign reporters, economics editors and others don’t like being told to change their angles, or what they need to do be more climate aware. So it’s on us, it’s on you reading this. We need right now to make a climate perspective an inevitable part of all news reporting, ad infuse it into all news, from the grassroots up.

In response to my question about how to avoid getting climate cut, Phil Chetwynd of AFP he said we do need a cultural shift, one led by the media’s leadership. he said this is needed to counter the complaint that climate reporting is seen as an “artificial pivot” or as a kind of activism. This is what I mean about those institutional barriers to change.

Personally I have less faith in the ability of the media’s leadership – and I am also someone with no leadership role myself. What we can do right now, however, is to spread a story and a common culture among us as news reporters to make the leaderships of media need to accommodate us and our understanding of the climate era.

Warren Fernandez at the Straits Times also spoke about how editors need to be more receptive to climate story pitches and to support this. But most journalism doesn’t get ‘pitched’; most journalism simply happens in an obvious way without much discussion because it is part of the daily process of taking for granted that news media covers news. So rather than climate reporting being the expensive exception and needing to survive by being pitched and supported, we need to make it obvious, everyday and inevitable.

To finish the panel,the mderator, Fergus Bell of Fathm, asked whether the idea of the separate climate reporter was not the modern version of the now-obsolete ‘web reporter’; in other words, is something that needs to be everywhere rather than seen as some some separate modern new thing. All the participants agreed, and Ritu Kapur at The Quint pointed out that this kind of expectation of a general change is also going to be brought in by younger and newly graduating journalists. So I think this confirms my existing belief in a cultural shift to a climate perspective. It also says to me that if you embrace this cultural change you are acting in keeping with the latest moves in modern newsrooms as well as playing a crucial part in the survival of our ecosystem.