Media Focus on Climate Change
Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 10:29 PM
In the news: As the climate crisis becomes more dire, publishers are
recalibrating to devote more editorial pages to the subject.
Scientists
generally agree that the climate crisis is an existential one, and many
publishers are planning their editorial calendars accordingly. But those
ramped-up efforts aren't necessarily reflected in the overall numbers.
Sara Guaglione of Digiday.com reports: "The Media and Climate Change
Observatory ... found that coverage of [climate] issues in August 2021
was the highest in more than a decade. However, climate change coverage
is lagging in the U.S. U.S. print coverage of the issue was down 0.2
percent and TV coverage decreased 10 percent in August 2021 compared to
the previous month."
But media companies aren't asleep at
the wheel. Guaglione reports that several major publishers are creating
new climate-oriented verticals to divert resources to the subject. Among
them are Condé Nast (who aims to be carbon neutral by 2030, says
Guaglione) and the New York Times, which will hold a nine-day
event in Glasgow during the 26th United Nations Climate Change
Conference (COP26). Read more about what publishers are doing to cover
this crucial issue here.
Also
Notable
Crowdfunding as Business Model?
Last
week, Kristen Hare of Poynter.org discussed how philanthropy and
crowdfunding have helped newsrooms to stay afloat during tumultuous
times last year. "When for-profit newsrooms asked their communities to
support them through donations, those communities did," she writes.
Local news, already hit hard by other changes in the past decade, took
additional hits they could ill afford as the pandemic took root in 2020.
The issue is more complex when it comes to bigger-ticket donors.
"For-profits need a nonprofit partner, Lenfest's Forman said, to offer
tax deductions for people who give money. Some newsrooms are building
out partnerships to make that work," reports Hare. What's more, she
says, "for-profit newsrooms need to publish clear policies on how they
handle gifts, what work is donor supported and what that means for the
journalism." Read more here.
The
Drone Journalism Controversy
Drone reporting has raised
thorny First Amendment issues for a lot of newsrooms. Grayson Clary of
the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, reports on a recent
instance this week on the committee's website. "A number of media
organizations ... had been using footage from unmanned systems to
document the federal response to the arrival of Haitian migrants
planning to seek asylum." Border Patrol temporarily restricted flights
at the border, but "media organizations could seek waivers from the
ban." This temporary flight restriction prompted news outlet Infowars to
sue the FAA. In response, Clary reports, the FAA has said that "the suit
is meritless, pointing out that the agency quickly processed waiver
applications from other outlets but Infowars had chosen not to apply for
one." Read more here.
Google
Search Changes
Amid all the other upheaval in the world this
year, changes to Google search have forced publishers to relearn the
wheel. Steve Wilson-Beales of Journalism.co.uk discusses these changes
in a recent article. Among them: Google resetting webpage titles,
sometimes to disastrous effect for publishers whose referenced titles in
their content no longer matched the Google results. Also, Wilson-Beales
writes, "Google made an update to its article schema to allow publishers
to include a link to an author's bio page on each article they write for
that publication.... Google [also] announced that [it] was going to
remove the requirement that all publishers had to follow the AMP method
of article delivery to appear in the Top Stories box at the top of the
search results." These changes, among others that Wilson-Beales
discusses in his article, have left publishers fumbling to figure out
the new Google landscape. Read more here.
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