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by Maxwell T. Boykoff, Marisa M. McNatt and Michael K. Goodman
Chapter 18 in The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication
Edited by Anders Hansen, Robert Cox
Over the past few years, the number of Reuters stories about climate change has continued to decline. This was consistent with trends across other media outlets globally due largely to political economic trends of shrinking newsrooms and fewer specialist reporters covering climate stories with the same frequency as before. In 2010, The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor closed their environmental blogs. Three years later, In January 2013, The New York Times dismantled its environment desk, assigning the reporters and editors to other departments, and discontinued its Green blog two months later. Yet, initially, Reuters had largely bucked those trends, continuing to employ top climate and environment reporters from around the globe including, Deborah Zabarenko (North America), Alister Doyle (Europe) and David Fogerty (Asia) who fed top media organizations with reporting comprised of a steady diet of climate and environment stories. So why this subsequent and precipitous drop in Reuters’s coverage of climate change? In July 2013, David Fogerty – who left Reuters in late 2012 – took to The Baron blog to explain why. He recounted that after the appointment of Editor Paul Ingrassia in 2011, editorial decisions were made to deprioritize climate stories, and to shift these specialists to different beats. Fogerty, for example, was moved from the climate beat to instead cover issues around shipping in the Asian region. While climate stories had been already declining upon the appointment of Ingrassia, many argued that his revamping of the Reuters reporting priorities served to accelerate this drop. Read more …
