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NYT closes its environment desk, reassigns journalists

avatar by Published Jan. 11, 2013 7:46 am Updated Jan. 11, 2013 7:06 pm

InsideClimate News | The Daily Climate
The nine journalists on The New York Times’ environment desk learned Wednesday they will be reassigned, Katherine Bagley reports. “No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk,” Bagley writes. Managing Editor for news operations Dean Baquet told Bagley the move was “wasn’t a decision we made lightly.” The “structural matter” was not related to budget, he said.

Baquet said the change “was prompted by the shifting interdisciplinary landscape of news reporting,” Bagley writes.

When the desk was created in early 2009, the environmental beat was largely seen as “singular and isolated,” he said. It was pre-fracking and pre-economic collapse. But today, environmental stories are “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects,” Baquet said. “They are more complex. We need to have people working on the different desks that can cover different parts of the story.”

The Daily Climate’s Douglas Fischer reported Jan. 2 that in 2012 the Times “published the most stories on climate change and had the biggest increase in coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers”; Times Assistant Managing Editor Glenn Kramon “attributed last year’s uptick in the paper’s coverage to the fruition of a 4-year-old effort to group top reporters on a separate environment desk,” Fischer writes.

Updates: New York Times’ Dot Earth blog responds to decision | Public Editor Margaret Sullivan responds

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  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Egg-Man/681171228 Egg Man

    and David Jolly and martin Fackler at the NYT and Malcolm Foster at AP also fell for this PR trickery and i told all of them ..”no no no Mr Jolly, Martin F was wrong, see my posts at Dot earth on this last week, the auction was fake yarase in Japanese, no money changed hands, the entire thing each year is marketing PR hype in japan this is called yarase, please google and correc this part to read — “When the Pacific bluefin does gain significant attention, it is often, paradoxically, as a commodity fetish for fake yarase PR marketing campaigns in gullible mass commun cations Japan. As my colleague in Tokyo, Martin Fackler reported incorrectly because he did not know the truth abut yarase , a sushi chain ”owner” CLAIMED to have ALLEGEDLY paid nearly $1.8 million for a bluefin, a record, at an auction on Saturday in Tokyo. The fee has never been confirmed as true, and it was double last year’s fee, with the same fake buyer. All Japanese people know this is fake thing, but West goes will with pics.
    The staggering amounts CLAIMED TO BE HAVE BEEN paid at the annual fake yarase New Year’s ”auctions” have far more to do with PR yarase and marketing than actual market price – but the fact that the fee keeps going up by DOUBLe each year is consistent with the increasingly PR yarase in Japan. Next year in 2014, the fee will be US$3.5 million, Watch this archive a year from now. and do not fall for this PR yarase any more..

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Egg-Man/681171228 Egg Man

    But Andrew, what you might cover here is how the entire USA media, from NYT to Dot Earth, to AP wire, wrote spurious news reports about a fake yarase tuna “auction” — caveat quotes mine — in Tokyo where the fake auction tuna was CLAIMED to have sold for $1.8 million USD when in fact there was no auction, no money changed hands, the bidder works for the PR yarase govt of Yarase-embedded Japanese journalism, the record fee was double last year and double the year before that, and next year will be double again at US$3.5 million, and the entire news story was faked PR yarase — that’s nihongo for faked trickery, and used in Japan newspapers daily — and yet AP wrote story as if true, and the NYT followed the AP wire. Andrew, look into this. Or next January 2014, the news will be yarase again with an even bigger tuna sold at 3.5 mil USD. when will america wake up to this Japanese media fakery? don’t believe me. i lived in Japan for 5 years , worked for major Japanese newspaper, I know what yarase is and this TUna action that made such big headlines, a la RECORD TUNA SOLD IN TOKYO was pure BS. See my comments at DOT EARTH. Andy Revkin thanked me personally for waking him up to this.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Egg-Man/681171228 Egg Man

    It’s not a big deal, IMHO. the NYT is still big on recording the slow collapse of human civilization as climate chaos descends on this planet, century by century now, and Andy Revkin was one of the first reporters anywhere to write about POLAR CITIES, which will serve as Homeland Security and CIA safe houses for survivors of global warming int he next 30 generations, come Hell AND high water. Whether it’s in print or digital, or in Dot Earth blog, the NYT will cover the Long Emergency we are in now with aplomb and finesse. NYT does not need a dedicated climate desk, these stories should appear all over the the paper, front page, biz, culture, art, literature, features, science. This was all much ado about nada. The Times marches on. BRAVO

  • JTFloore

    the change “was prompted by the shifting interdisciplinary landscape of news reporting.” huh? a myopic government employee buried deep in the bureaucracy could not have said it better. what readers of the times have long expected is genuine expertise in complex subjects, a value that, one fears, just might be slipping away.

  • Andrea

    Seems the NYT has moved its focus on the environment onto the front pages — in its headlines.