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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