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Local & Green 1: flicking the switch

Each day this week I’ll be posting on Local & Green: why environmental journalism is best at the local level, and can help grow a renewed local media industry. Today I’m looking at…

Flicking the Switch: which newspapers are making the leap to communal green media?
Inspired by last month’s Carnival of Journalism, I blogged about why local media should take the opportunity to connect with its community through environmental action and campaigns. I picked up on a number of examples that were delivering a positive “communal address” to help people take small actions in their lives: however, none of the examples were from local media groups. And it left me wondering why regional media were not using green to drive growth. More »

Tags: campaign, climate change, environmental journalism, Journalism, local & green, local media

Simon Hoggart’s ‘dogmatic and irrational’ mistake

Yesterday in the Guardian Simon Hoggart referred to the environmental movement as a ‘religion - dogmatic and irrational’ in a small aside about wind power as the last entry in his week’s sketch. The full quote:

We are to have across our still beautiful countryside thousands more ghastly, noisy, hideous wind turbines, which produce very little energy at enormous cost. Proof that the environmental movement has become a religion - dogmatic and irrational - in that it has now persuaded government that to save the environment, we must first destroy it. [my emphasis]

Not the kind of environmental journalism you expect from the Guardian, which has delivered a consistent and well-researched line of sober alarm on climate change. More »

Tags: climate change, environmental journalism, Guardian, reporting

Climate reporting: good, bad, experimental: 2

Yesterday I looked at an example of bad environment reporting. Janet Raloff’s failure to apply traditional news values in reporting a flawed attack on the IPCC opened up the danger that a ’scanning’ reader of the article, on the US Science News site, could believe the attack had credibilty.

Janet picked up the story from a poorly attended press conference. Which concerned her, but not enough to handle the story in a different way, or not at all. Responding to Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News (which I’ve yet to read… I ordered it for our library, and then some other buggers researchers borrowed it before I got my hands on it), Director of the Science Media Centre Fiona Fox writes a defence of the press conference for getting science stories into the hands of journalists. What does she say? More »

Tags: best practice, climate change, environmental journalism, IPCC, Raloff, science reporting