It’s hard to dispute the public’s dismay over climate change. When hundreds of thousands of people take to the Manhattan streets, as they did in the People’s Climate March last month, something big is clearly happening.
But a year ago, the signs weren’t particularly good for coverage of the environment in The New York Times.
A special group (or “pod”) of reporters who had that expertise had been disbanded, and the Green blog had been discontinued. I wrote about it several times, including a column that demonstrated that the amount and quality of coverage had declined.
Now, I’m glad to report, things are looking up again. Since the survival of the planet ranks pretty high on my list of what matters, it seems worth noting here exactly what’s happening and why.
The most notable change is the addition of some heavy-hitting reporters to a team with a newly appointed editor, Adam Bryant. The reporters include John Schwartz, David Kocieniewski and Henry Fountain. Erica Goode, who founded the original environmental team in 2009 and was its editor for two years, will be a science writer at large, reporting to Mr. Bryant. They join Justin Gillis and Michael Wines in New York and Coral Davenport in Washington, as well as Felicity Barringer on the West Coast. In addition, James Gorman has been contributing a multimedia element with his Science Take videos.
“The idea is that climate change is the biggest story going, and we ought to be on it in a big way,” said the science editor, Barbara Strauch. She said that the idea to beef up the team had come from Jill Abramson, before she was fired last spring, and that the new executive editor, Dean Baquet, had put his full weight and considerable enthusiasm behind it.
“He’s made it one of his priorities,” Ms. Strauch said of Mr. Baquet. She described Mr. Bryant as a very strong, experienced editor who, though not an expert in environment coverage, should prove to be a good leader.
“He’s good at seeing the big thoughts. It helps sometimes not to be an expert,” she said.
The Times has also begun a solutions-oriented series, “The Big Fix,” with more installments on the way. (I had noted, in my previous columns, that there had not been a major series on the environment in some time; that has now been remedied.)
“To state the obvious, it’s an incredibly important story,” Mr. Bryant told me. “There’s a lot of opportunity to connect the dots, to ask the big questions.” He said he is looking for “conceptual scoops,” as well as aggressive coverage of hard news on the subject.
And he is well equipped to do so now: “I’ve got this unbelievable team of reporters.”
One reader, Katy Lederer, wrote to me with a potential downside to having many of these reporters work from the science desk. She had noticed, she wrote, “that almost all stories having to do with climate change have been put into the Science section.” She added: “Keeping these stories primarily in the Science section sends a signal to your readers that the phenomenon of climate change is still something to be studied or examined by scientists–some sort of scientific or natural phenomenon–and not something that is human-caused and already affecting our daily lives. Leaving climate change out of relevant stories that appear outside of the Science section sends the same, outdated message.”
Ms. Strauch disagreed with some of Ms. Lederer’s observations. She noted, “We recently did a full science section devoted to climate change, but aside from that, stories on this topic appear all over the paper and more often than not, on page one.” Examples include a story on Germany’s push into renewable energy, another about scientists linking extreme heat in Australia to climate change, and stories about climate change and the California drought. She also disagreed that putting stories in the science section signals that the science is still debatable.
However, she said: “I do agree that we need to do more stories on how climate change is affecting our daily lives. We very much plan on doing more of those stories. And I would imagine that many of those stories will appear in the front section of the paper, as they have already.”
The Times’s renewed — and in fact, increased — commitment is a most welcome development. I hope that the coverage will be approached with the sense of urgency that this dire situation demands.