» Climate coverage soars in 2013, spurred by energy, weather

Max Boykoff’s media and climate change research highlighted in Daily Climate article

Climate coverage soars in 2013, spurred by energy, weather
by Douglas Fischer

Niche journalism

A growing universe of niche and mostly online publications such as Inside Climate also fueled the overall rise in climate coverage, media experts and the Daily Climate’s database suggest.

“Our work infiltrated in ways we never dreamed of,” Sassoon said. “I can’t say that our work has had a big influence on the uptick in the raw number of climate stories. But it is pretty evident to us that we’ve changed the quality and the substance of the national discourse.”

But that metric – how or whether the uptick in coverage has changed public opinion on climate change – is far more difficult to assess.

“When you look at public opinion data, it’s still the nightly news, believe it or not. That’s still the single biggest driver,” said Robert Brulle, a social scientist at Drexel University who monitors climate coverage and has spent time plumbing the depths of the Daily Climate’s archives.

Brulle’s tracking of TV news shows climate coverage was stable last year, with nightly news at ABC, NBC and CBS airing 30 stories, compared to 29 in 2012.

Nightly news’ impact

Brulle also works with media watchers at the University of Colorado who track climate change coverage in major news newspapers worldwide. That team’s data show a decline in coverage among the top five newspapers in the United States.

But those trackers, unlike The Daily Climate’s aggregation, count a story only if the words “global warming” or “climate change” appear.

“So a story all about the politics of Keystone, or Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) and his struggles with the White House, aren’t going to show up in our search,” Brulle said.

Those stories would be picked up by the Daily Climate’s team of part-time researchers, who scour the web twice daily. Read more …