The Guardian has ramped up its environmental coverage recently, including the establishment of a Guardian Environment Network that has started publishing articles from blog networks such as RealClimate.org, giving them prominence on the Guardian main site.
One piece by Bibi van der Zee is about the Climate Rush, taking place today, which, as Bibi notes, “is modelled on the “rush” on Parliament 100 years ago by the Suffragettes.” And it’s organisers may risk jail for doing so.
What caught my eye was something I’d not noticed before: the Guardian has a section for Activists stories, its own taxonomical category. I wondered if this was something new. Well, perhaps, as stories could have been retroactively classified, but the archive goes back to 1999, so probably just my slow eye…
There are now 433 arcticles categorised as ‘activist’ (of or about activism and activists, mainly environmental). What was interesting was the explosion of stories tagged as ‘activist’ over the past two years. Here’s the breakdown of the archive:
There were 173 articles between 1999 and 2006. So far in 2008 there are 148, and counting. So has there been an increase in activism? Most certainly, but that’s not the whole story, I’d argue. More interesting I expect is that this graph, perhaps, shows the increased space that the Guardian and other web news products can give to its new niche story areas.
Now there’s nothing scientific about this, and I’m not claiming there to be. I just thought it was an interesting way to look at what could be an increase in the Guardian’s coverage of environment issues over time, realised through the spatial freedoms the web brings.
Most searches through newspaper archives such as LexisNexis will show how the environment still gets far less coverage across UK newspapers than any other major social issue: e.g. crime, the economy, health, even celebrity. This is more so in the popular papers, the tabloids, with their many million circulations and readerships.
But one thing online is certainly doing is providing the space for environmental issues that don’t always gain prominence in the paper formats of the big news brands. And sometimes this is not always a good thing – for example, the Guardian continue to publish Brendan O’Neill.
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