The Nature of Environmental Journalism

The Nature of Environmental Journalism: How reporting on our world has changed,held strong

By: Austin Fleskes

Much like the natural world around us, the world of environmental journalism has seen its share of changes. From administration to administration, the nature of environmental journalism has been ever-evolving, reflecting the view of the environment and the role of journalistic reporting within.

But conferences like that held by the Society for Environmental Journalists at Colorado State University have served to demonstrate the sheer force that environmental journalism still has, even in a time of decline.

CSU professor and environmental journalist Joe Champ said that conferences like that of SEJ provide both a bounty of information but also a sort of ritualistic experience.

“That what is going on is you are hearing the chatter, you are getting a sense of the trends and the flows in people’s conversations and in their body language and who is talking to who,” Champ said. “That is really valuable, and it is really hard to get that in an online experience. Online can be fantastic but to have that face-to-face contact with people, to come together and remind everybody what the project is or what the projects are and what the trends and patterns are that happens at a conference.”

Hundreds of journalists gathered in the Lory Student Center at CSU and throughout parts of Colorado to learn about environmental journalism in near countless ways; from how to be safe when reporting to how to report accurately on Native American land ownership.

But the greater theme of the entire week of events, plenaries and dinners was the importance of the field of environmental journalism.

“There are some very critical issues facing the human race: climate change, toxic pollution, water scarcity, food scarcity and then at local levels local environmental justice problems,” said Nick Cunningham, a freelance environmental journalist who travelled to the convention from Oregon. “So, I think journalists can bring a lot of these issues to light (and) inform the public. A lot of this stuff doesn’t get into the public consciousness without journalism.”

After his plenary on the morning of Oct. 11, Whit Fosburgh, the President and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said that with all the difficult news in the world today, it is the role of environmental journalists to inform the public correctly.

“Your role is to really explain these issues in ways that are relevant to people in ways they can understand it and, from my standpoint, and really help guide them to how they can get engaged,” Fosburgh said. “Because if you are not doing that then we are subjected to the lunatic fake news out there.”

Fosburgh added that the role of environmental journalists also serves to make sure that the entire nation is informed before they step foot in a voting booth.

Champ said that environmental journalism serves to call out those who have a “natural tendency” to make a gain from a certain situation being a certain way.

“Environmental journalism and journalism and general is supposed to shine a light on those situations,” Champ said. “To ask the world ‘is this okay with you?’ So I think that right there is a huge value and the reason especially now it needs to continue to happen. Otherwise, how are we going to know what is going on, especially when we have these institutions that are gaining from other people’s loss.”

However, despite the agreed-upon importance of environmental journalists, the field still faces hardships. With cutbacks and layoffs, the field is growing smaller. Champ said that he remembered that even 20 years ago papers like the Coloradoan had an environmental reporter, helping write 10-12 daily, local stories.

Now, the story count has dropped, and the environmental reporter staff job is no longer existent.

“Your mid-range newspapers don’t have an environmental reporter anymore,” Champ said. “That is a huge problem, especially in that mid-range media institution we are seeing people who focus on the environment are not there. You don’t have that skill set, that knowledge that people will have, that cultural memory that they carry along with them and add to as they continue to do their jobs.”

These layoffs are something that we have seen increase over the years, as more newsrooms are forced to cut costs.

According to a Pew Research analysis, in 2018 27% of large newspapers experienced layoffs. While this is lower than 2017, where researches saw a 31% layoff rate, the percentage of large newspapers that experiences more than one round of layoffs rose from 17% in 2017 to 31% in 2018.

Cunningham said that because of the layoffs and hard times that journalism is facing right now, new job opportunities have opened to fill that hole.

“It seems like there is a lot more reporting going to freelancers than it used to be, there are less staff jobs it seems,” Cunningham said. “That provides challenges but there are also opportunities there. There are new ways of doing things.”

And it is this new way of doing things, along with the heightened public interest in environmental justice, that has kept environmental journalism moving forward and even changing.

Brian Calvert, the editor-in-chief of High Country News said that he sees the importance in a shift in focus for environmental journalism. He said that environmental journalism, by itself, is hard to define, but needs to evolve outside of the realm of understanding that we have right now.

“When it starts to expand into something else then you are really talking about intersectional journalism,” Calvert said. “So, I think the idea of economics intersecting with race relations intersecting with the way people approach the world around them that is not human, all of that is very important and needs to be all sort of holistically wrapped together.”

Calvert added that he advises that people should move away from seeing environmental journalism as a small niche and blowing it up.

But a huge part of this shift in focus for the environmental journalism world comes from the students and young journalists who are aspiring to report on the issues that we, as humans, are facing.

“(Young journalists) are the future, (they) have to understand not only the issues and how to dissect the BS out of them but also how to tell that story in a way that actually people would listen to it,” Fosburgh said.

Calvert said that for young journalists to survive and thrive in the industry, they must build a framework of knowledge to then “pour concrete into a lot of different shapes.”

“The most important thing that young journalists can do, in my perspective, is to broaden their horizons, go to a bunch of things, understand a lot of different people, walk in a lot of different shoes and then start to put facts to that and move journalism away from just repetition of facts, which people can get information as far as the eye can see, but to do something meaningful,” Calvert said. “How do you write something meaningful for people that they can sort of move forward in their lives in this chaotic mediascape?”

Champ said that while there are still dwindling jobs and even more dwindling staff jobs for environmental reporters, he is still hopeful for the future of environmental journalism.

One thing that he said he has seen that is impressive for the future of this field is how young journalists are approaching it all.

“Some are really jumping into the hardcore science stuff, some are really jumping into the journalism and communication, other people into the strategic and advocacy communication, people are doing participatory events with all this stuff around Greta Thunberg and this whole movement that is arising,” Champ said. “People seem to really be jumping into doing things and it’s exciting. It’s inspiring”