2021 World News Day: Global newsrooms increasing climate change coverage
News organisations around the world are beginning to intensify their reporting on climate change. More than two-thirds of newsrooms in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas plan to increase their coverage of the climate crisis, according to a survey made by visiting Research Fellow Wolfgang Blau at Reuters Institute, Oxford University.
He is presenting his findings in an article in connection with the 2021 World News Day celebrated on September 28. The 2021 World News Day is highlighting the critical importance of credible journalism in providing trustworthy information about the climate crisis. Organisers are the World Editors Forum and the Canadian Journalism Foundation.
The day includes a 75-minute event highlighting regional climate change issues available in all time zones on Sept. 28: World News Day YouTube channel. Journalism from the following news organizations will be featured: Al Jazeera English, BBC, CBC News, Deutsche Welle, Global News, the Guardian, The New Yorker, Reuters, The Sacramento Bee, The Straits Times, South China Morning Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Univision.
Blau writes that newsrooms that expand their climate reporting typically choose one of the following three organisational structures:
- Increase the budget of their existing science desk.
- Set up a whole new climate desk which then operates in parallel with their existing science desk.
- A less common approach is an interdisciplinary ‘climate hub’ approach with existing staff.
All three organisational models have their strengths and weaknesses, Blau writes and mentions:
- A strong advantage of the climate hub approach is that it can accelerate a news organisation’s transformation towards integrating the climate aspects of any story.
- The advantage of a new climate desk is that it allows creation of a new team that has a wider range of expertise than a typical science desk.
- Launching a new climate desk tends to have greater PR value for a news organisation if it wants to signal a change in editorial priorities to its potential subscribers and advertisers.
- German climate journalist Sara Schurmann, who is advising Germany’s public broadcaster SWR on its climate journalism, has suggested a fourth tactic which is to install a temporary ‘managing climate editor’ as part of the chief editor’s team.
Blau says that amongst more cultural obstacles to reach the goal mentioned in the survey was journalists’ fear of being accused of activism if they start covering the climate crisis more frequently than before.
”Given the foreseeable battles over climate policy in many countries, newsroom managers would do their staff and their journalism a favour if they now reviewed their codes of ethics or editorial codes of conduct once more, this time to make sure there is at least a shared understanding in their newsroom of what is activism and, more importantly, of what isn’t activism in covering the accelerating climate crisis”, Blau writes.
Blau has served as Global Chief Operating Officer of Condé Nast, Executive Director of Digital Strategy at The Guardian and Editor-in-Chief of Germany’s Zeit Online.
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