After Changes, How Green Is The Times?
In January, The Times dismantled its “pod” of reporters and editors devoted to that subject. And in March, it discontinued its Green blog, a daily destination for environmental news. Times editors emphasized that they were not abandoning the subject — just taking it out of its silo and integrating it into many areas of coverage. The changes were made for both cost-cutting and strategic reasons, they said, and the blog did not have high readership. Readers and outside critics weren’t buying it. They scoffed at the idea that less would somehow translate into not only more, but also better.
So what has happened since? And where does the situation stand now? I talked to Times journalists and outside observers who are close readers of The Times’s environment coverage — including former Vice President Al Gore, a leading voice and a former newspaper journalist himself. And with the help of a news assistant, Jonah Bromwich, my office did its own analysis.
Some observations:
• The quantity of climate change coverage decreased. Maxwell T. Boykoff, who tracks media coverage of the environment at the University of Colorado, said that from April to September of last year, The Times’s print edition published 362 articles in which climate change featured prominently. In the same six months this year, that number dropped significantly — by about a third — to 242 articles. However, he warned: “It’s complicated. We can be lulled into thinking that more coverage is better; that’s not always true.” And the amount of news coverage, of course, often corresponds to particular events or controversies. (Overall U.S. news coverage of climate change has plummeted, he said, after peaks in 2007 and 2009.)
• Beyond quantity, the amount of deep, enterprising coverage of climate change in The Times appears to have dropped, too. In that six-month period this year, there were only three front-page stories in which climate change was the main focus, compared with nine the year before. All three were written by the excellent science reporter Justin Gillis, and two of three were pegged to a specific global warming milestone (the other had to do with President Obama’s policy on the environment). With fewer reporters and no coordinating editor, what was missing was the number and variety of fresh angles from the previous year — such as a September article on what is being revealed beneath that Arctic ice melting at a record pace.
• The Times, which has published many groundbreaking series on the environment, has not had such a series since Mr. Gillis’s “Temperature Rising” ended in January. Such series not only provide especially deep reporting, but their presence also shows the subject is a high priority. “The Times is the thought leader and the agenda-setter, both globally and in the United States,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s Project on Climate Change Communication. “What it does matters tremendously, especially on this topic whose impact is invisible.”
• The Green blog, which Dr. Leiserowitz called “an invaluable and trusted place,” has not been replaced, nor has the approximately $40,000-a-year worth of freelance reporting for the blog that extended the sweep and scope of environmental coverage.
Despite all this, many observers, including Mr. Gore, praised the strengths of The Times’s environmental journalism, including Mr. Gillis’s work. They applauded The Times’s recent hiring of Coral Davenport, an outstanding Washington-based environmental reporter, to cover the Environmental Protection Agency. (The Times lost a major E.P.A.-related scoop on coal-fired power plants to The Wall Street Journal in September after its longtime beat reporter John Broder moved to a new post.) Two other well-respected reporters, John Schwartz and Michael Wines, have begun covering environmental issues. And with the integration of the former International Herald Tribune as the International New York Times, all Times readers are seeing expanded worldwide offerings on this subject, both in news and opinion.
Nonetheless, some observers worry.
“This subject requires a champion because it doesn’t really generate its own news pegs,” said Daniel R. Fagin, a longtime Newsday environmental reporter, now a New York University professor and author. “It’s not a news beat; it’s an ooze beat.”
The Times’s top editors addressed that recently. Perhaps recognizing that the topic had become fragmented, if not rudderless, they appointed a science desk editor, Mary Ann Giordano, to coordinate environmental coverage, in addition to other duties. She is putting together a list of enterprise articles and looking for holes in coverage, and said that a new series was in the works.
“There are so many tentacles to this subject and a lot of big topics we need to delve into,” she said. “And someone needs to keep track.”
While there may be disagreement on how to proceed, there should be no dispute about the importance of The Times’s role or the crucial nature of the subject.
“Simply assuming that this is an interesting controversy that we should check in on occasionally is not correct. The survival of human civilization is at risk,” Mr. Gore said. “The news media should be making this existential crisis the No. 1 topic they cover.”
Fonte: nytimes.com
