Economic, Technological, and Organizational Factors Influencing News Coverage of Climate Change

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the global news industry has embarked upon a major project of economic, organizational, and technological restructuring. In organizational terms, successive waves of mergers and buyouts have yielded a global news landscape where most of the larger firms are owned by shareholders and run by executives whose singular focus is on rationalizing news production and improving profitability. Although in some cases, these shareholders and executives have used their authority to influence climate coverage directly, more often their goals are non-ideological: reducing labor costs and increasing revenues. At the same time, in a parallel development, the digital media revolution not only has spawned a host of new online competitors but also has cut deeply into the advertising revenue once enjoyed by traditional media firms. Within legacy news organizations, these industrial and technological trends have converged to dramatically intensify the work pressures facing environmental journalists. For example, in an effort to reduce costs, many firms have reduced newsroom staff to a small core of multi-tasking reporters, supported by a wider web of part-time freelancers. In this process, the science and environment beat is often the first to go, with environmental specialists among the first to be reassigned or downsized (and pushed into freelance work). For all reporters, there is increased pressure to produce more stories in less time on multiple media platforms, a trend that, in turn, enhances the power of special interests to influence climate coverage through public relations and other external information subsidies. Due to these converging industrial and technological trends, environmental reporters now work in a new media ecosystem that is complex, subject to contradictory pressures, and in many ways hostile to the production of high-quality climate news. When the environmental beat is cut, climate change often becomes the purview of general assignment reporters who lack experience and expertise. For their part, freelance specialists continue to cover climate news, but their ability to sustain this coverage over the long term is constrained by their part-time status. Finally, although niche climate blogs have provided welcome spaces for environmental journalists to produce in-depth coverage, these outlets usually reach only tiny audiences composed of the already-engaged. In short, without significant action, the regrettable status quo of climate news—that is, an episodic sprinkling of climate coverage scattered across the media ecosystem—will continue indefinitely. Policy-makers should therefore restore long-term institutional and economic support for environmental journalists specializing in climate science and policy.

Climate journalism in a changing media ecosystem: Assessing the production of climate change‐related news around the world

“…This is particularly true in the US, where studies have revealed a decline in science and environmental reporting due to the growing pressure on the traditional business models of legacy media. This has led to the restructuring and downsizing of newsrooms, fewer beats, fewer specialist journalists, generalist rather than specialist reporters covering science and the environment, outsourcing to freelancers, the migration of specialist reporters to general assignments or other desks, less time for investigative reporting, and a need to produce more output for a greater variety of platforms (Boykoff & Yulsman, 2013; Friedman, 2015; Gibson, 2017). Similar developments have been identified in Canada (Callison & Tindall, 2017), although their extent is less clear due to a smaller number of available studies.…”

“…Some have argued that niche sites generally only reach small audiences who are already well‐informed about climate change, resulting in echo‐chambers of like‐minded publics (Gibson, 2017). However, a recent survey of 40 countries suggests that specialist outlets covering climate issues rank third for general audiences as a source of climate news after television and online sites of major news organizations (Newman, 2020).…”

“…Scholars have long hoped that online media, with its lower thresholds for participation and reduced focus on professional gatekeepers, would remedy this one‐sided source structure (Schäfer, 2012a). However, this has not proved to be the case (Gibson, 2017). Online news has been found to be

very similar to the news of other media in being heavily reliant on state representatives (such as government ministers, judges and public officials) and on experts.

…”

“…Generally, scholars have diagnosed a strong and increasing influence of PR on climate journalism. It has been claimed that “one of the more sobering consequences of newsroom restructuring” and downsizing is that PR has attained an “enhanced power […] to shape the news on climate science and policy” and that this “reliance on PR is even more profound in science and environmental reporting than in the newsroom as a whole” (Gibson, 2017, p. 455; Vogler & Schäfer, 2020). This dependence on PR sources has long been identified in environmental journalism in general, where “around a half of all environmental news stories and approximately 20% of environmental coverage originate from press releases.” However, it is likely that this trend has increased in recent times (Anderson, 2017, p. 472).…”

Resilience

“…Journalists are important in the process of climate change communication. Even though journalists themselves are embedded in, and influenced by, different normative, organizational, and social layers in their work (Shoemaker & Reese, 1995; see also Engesser (2017) and Gibson (2017), even though their position in public communication has changed from "gatekeeper" to "gatewatchers" (Bruns, 2008), and even though new journalistic role models have emerged (Allan, Fahy, & Nisbet, 2011), their impact on the selection of topics, stakeholders, and perspectives in media coverage is still considerable.…”