Is climate journalism experiencing its own Great Resignation?
Last summer, former Outside/In host Sam Evans-Brown quit journalism to become a lobbyist for clean energy.
He’s not alone. Millions of people left their jobs or changed careers in the past couple years. But is the field of climate journalism going through its own “Great Resignation?” In a moment when the stakes are so high, are the people who cover the climate crisis leaving journalism to try to help solve it?
Producer Justine Paradis talks with two reporters who recently found themselves re-evaluating their personal and professional priorities: one who left journalism, and another who stayed.
Featuring Sophie Gilbert, Sam Evans-Brown, Stephen Lacey, Julia Pyper, Meaghan Parker, and Kendra Pierre-Louis.
Kendra Pierre-Louis kneels on the Greenland ice sheet.
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LINKS
The podcast episode of Warm Regards that Justine mentions is “Apocalyptic Narratives, Climate Data, and Hope, with Zeke Hausfather and Diego Arguedas Ortiz”
The history of objectivity is arguably one of the “great confusions of journalism.” In the early 20th century, reporter Walter Lippman and editor Charles Merz contended that objectivity is a practice akin to the scientific method. “The method is objective, not the journalist.”
More recently, plenty of folks have commented on problems with “bias” in journalism, including Lewis Raven Wallace, Wesley Lowery, and Sam Sanders, who wrote, “The avoidance of the ‘perception’ of ‘bias’ ultimately means the only reporters to be trusted are those whose lives haven’t been directly touched by the issues and struggles they’re covering. And you [know] what that means.”
Julia Pyper’s podcast Political Climate
Post Script Media, Stephen Lacey’s podcast company
How cable TV covered climate change in 2021
Nate Johnson, a former journalist who left Grist to become an electrician, featured on How to Save a Planet
Kendra Pierre-Louis spoke in greater depth about her career and what it’s like to be a Black woman in journalism with Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt on Hot Take.
The Yale Climate Opinion Maps find that 72% of Americans believe in global warming, although just 33% report hearing about climate in the media at least once a week. You can explore the data and see how climate attitudes vary by state and county.
For Sarah Miller, all the right words on climate have already been said. “I could end this story by saying ‘We kept swimming and it was beautiful even if it will all be gone someday,’ or some shit, but I already ended another climate story that way. I have, several times, really nailed that ending… Writing is stupid. I just want to be alive.”
A controlled burn in a northern New Hampshire pine barren. Credit: Taylor Quimby.
CREDITS
Special thanks to Nate Johnson and Peter Howe
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Justine Paradis
Editing and additional mixing by Taylor Quimby
Additional editing: Rebecca Lavoie, Nate Hegyi, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt
Executive Producer: Rebecca Lavoie
Music: Sarah the Illstrumentalist, Daniel Fridell, baegel, FLYIN, Smartface, Silver Maple, By Lotus, 91nova, Moon Craters, Pandaraps, and Blue Dot Sessions
Theme Music: Breakmaster Cylinder
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/In[box] hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi. Sophie Gilbert is a wildlife ecologist. In her career, she’s studied how animals respond to environmental changes: like how deer in the Pacific Northwest respond to clear-cutting. A little over a year ago, she was offered tenure at the University of Idaho. And in academia, that’s a big deal.
Sophie Gilbert: Tenure is basically the freedom to do and say what you want within some boundaries of scientific acceptability. It's kind of what people call academic freedom.
But even as she was being handed a big promotion, academic freedom, and basically job security for life – Sophie had doubts.
[mux in: Black Tern, By Lotus]
Sophie Gilbert: Yeah, I think my skepticism about whether or not my work really mattered had been growing for a few years.
Nate Hegyi: It came to a head last summer. She got tenure. She'd also had a baby. Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest was experiencing something known as a “Heat Dome” – record-breaking temperatures that literally cooked shellfish in their tidal pools. And California was on fire.
Sophie Gilbert: And during that, I was doing this kind of apocalyptic drive. My husband and I and our kid, trying to visit my family in Northern California. So driving, like, right through the heart of this heat dome…
SFX - cars
CBS in June: Portland yesterday was 116 degrees –
Sophie Gilbert: …trying to stay cool…
CBS in June: – shattered its all-time record…
Sophie Gilbert: …trying to stay hydrated…
ABC in June: Extreme and exceptional drought…
Sophie Gilbert: …driving past pillars of wildfire smoke already.
ABC in March: Leading to a much earlier onset of dangerous fire conditions. Calfire is saying lack of rain means that the grasses and other vegetation are devoid of any moisture…
CBS in June: 8 degrees or so… well today we were in the 90s…
Sophie Gilbert: And it just, it really felt like a, like we were driving through a preview of the future in some way. It was really viscerally, gut-level, distressing and scary.
MUX OUT
Sophie Gilbert: You sit down with yourself and realize that something has to change. You're at the point where, where things can't actually stay the same.
MUX FADE
Sophie Gilbert: So, I tweeted this on April 10th. And I said, “I have some big news to share.
MUX IN: baegel
I've decided to leave academia in order to work more directly on fixing climate change. [fade] Despite receiving tenure last month, I’ve felt increasingly compelled over the last year to make a major change in how I spend the remainder of my career.”
Nate Hegyi: Sophie is not alone. She is just one of millions of people who quit their jobs or even changed careers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is a moment when basic ideas of how or why or in what conditions we work have changed. People who once thought they had a clear trajectory to their lives have found themselves derailed, asking existential questions like, “why do I do this job?” Or, “is it worth it?”
At one point the “quit rate” in the US reached a 20-year high. That’s according to Pew Research. It was a moment known as the Great Resignation. But what sets Sophie apart, is that she quit in large part because of climate change. Something that hits close to home for this very podcast.
Sam Evans-Brown: I will say, I was like asking myself, like, like, okay, I like this job. I could do this job for 25 years and probably be happy the whole time… Is that what I want to do?
Nate Hegyi: If you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll recognize this voice as that of Sam Evans-Brown, former host of Outside/In.
Sam left his job – this job – in environmental journalism, in part, because he wasn’t sure it mattered anymore.
And last June… he quit too.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. Yeah… there is a lot that I deeply, deeply believe in that is part of the mission of journalism. And then there's a lot that I like. Am incredibly skeptical of.
[theme rise]
Nate Hegyi: Instead of talking about the energy transition, he wanted to go do it. From climate journalism to climate action.
Sam Evans-Brown: The transition to clean energy, the more I learn about it, the more I’m like: obviously.
[theme post]
Nate Hegyi: Alright. Sure. Some people leave their jobs, or change careers. It’s part of life.
But today on Outside/In, producer Justine Paradis is wondering: is something unusual happening with climate reporters?
Stephen Lacey: Yeah. There seems to be a churn.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: I was getting bummed out because there’s only so much time and energy you can spend chronicling the harm that’s happening without feeling something.
In these years, when the stakes are so high, are the reporters who cover the climate crisis leaving journalism… to go help solve it?
Julia Pyper: It’s hard when you know so much about an issue and how big the crisis is to stay on the sidelines at some point.
Does climate journalism even matter?
Sam Evans-Brown: People are using us to poush. and we’re not in the driver’s seat.
Here’s producer Justine Paradis.
[theme fade]
Justine Paradis: For posterity, can you please state for the record the date, the time, and the location of this conversation?
Sam Evans-Brown: [laughs] I believe it's the… it's June… It's one week before June 25th, which would make it June 18th.
Justine Paradis: And we are at New Hampshire Public Radio. This is like a deposition you're giving testimony here.
Sam Evans-Brown: [laughs]
Justine Paradis: I spoke with Sam last year, in 2021 – a week before his last day on Outside/In. The day he was going to leave journalism after almost 10 years in the industry. And at first, it wasn’t easy for him to say why.
Sam Evans-Brown: Cuz it’s a great job. I’m not leaving Outside/In because I’m sick of my job. Right. The – I'm leaving Outside/In because of… like we could sort of. I was thinking about this. Like, like Justine's going to ask me this question, why am I leaving the job? And I was just like running through answers in my brain, and i was like, I can say any of these.
Justine Paradis: Alright. So, here’s a person who had it pretty good. Sam’s the host of a show. He was making decent money… decent money for public radio. He even left right in the middle of releasing a series on American offshore wind, essentially a new clean-energy industry.
But…
[mux: Lick Stick, Blue Dot Sessions]
Sam Evans-Brown: I am like a little bit heartbroken to be leaving journalism…
I love journalism, but have gotten to a point with it where I don't fully believe in journalism.
Justine Paradis: So how did he get to this point?
Before Outside/In, Sam spent years in the public radio newsroom reporting on the environment, which is a pretty wide-ranging beat.
He reported on wildlife, like bald eagles and rabbits, cod… he reported on the grid; sustainability stuff like backyard composting and chicken regulations, and a lot of climate change: warming oceans, extreme weather, acid rain, wildfires.
It was rewarding. But with an important caveat: the standard length for a public radio news story – is four minutes. And just in case you wondered, that is not a lot of time.
MUX OUT
Sam Evans-Brown: It's an impossible job. Like the job is literally impossible to try to describe the world in 4 minutes or less. And I would, like, do the best I could, but you never get it right. And the, like, stock line that I came up with is like 4 minutes is just enough time to piss everybody off.
Justine Paradis: Sam’s stories aired nationally on NPR. He won awards. And he pushed for longer stories, sometimes with multiple parts. But, behind the scenes…
MUX IN: Father Time, Smartface, drum stems
Sam Evans-Brown: I would just, like, dread publishing stories because I would know that I was going to get these like haranguing emails from these people who mostly were representing political parties or, you know, moneyed interests.
And, like, the aggressiveness with which they, like, pursue reporters was something I like wasn't quite prepared for.
I got a mouthguard around this time because I was like grinding my teeth so hard.
MUX POST: Father Time, Smartface
Justine Paradis: One of the most important ideas in journalism – is that of objectivity. Like a lot of journalists, Sam didn’t really believe that you can totally separate your work from your biases or identity – but he DID believe in approaching a story with an open mind, almost scientifically.
MUX FADE
Sam Evans-Brown: Generally, like the way I see it is to deeply engage with the people you aren't, you don't have the tendency to agree with… because I find for me personally, when I do this… I often do find there are things that that they're right about. And and that for me has been like a really valuable thing to practice.
Justine Paradis: Sam had been on the job about a year or so when a number of wind farms were proposed in a rural part of New Hampshire. And, with them, a huge anti-wind backlash emerged.
Sam Evans-Brown: And I just remember going out to these sort of like town hall meetings where people were talking about wind power. And I was just like, wow, there is so much misinformation being repeated. And it's just like, we just need to get these people the facts... and so it's like, okay. So people are saying that the sound is a problem. What do the studies say? All the way to the bottom, like find every study. And you put in, you put it in the story and like the people who don't like the conclusions of what the science is saying are just like extra mad at you. And and and then I became like a part of the pro-wind lobby in their mind. And even though the fact I was like, I was like engaging deeply with what they were saying, it didn't matter. Like, I became against them.… The point is that, that like, you, I wasn't changing anyone's mind.
MUX IN: Bungalow Bed, Moon Craters
like these folks who were anti-wind activists were anti-wind activists for for reasons that had nothing to do with the amount of information that was available in the world.
Justine Paradis: So, this journalism thing – what was it even doing? Was getting more information out into the world even working? And what would “working” even look like? For Sam, at least… at least in this particular form, he wasn’t sure if his stories really had an impact.
Sam Evans-Brown: What I think journalism does not do is shift the discourse dramatically… because I think mostly we're reproducing the discourse. And and so we're not changing the values of society, mostly, at least not in a, you know, not in the way we hope to.
MUX FADE
Justine Paradis: A few years into his career, the station launched this very podcast, Outside/In, and Sam was host. Which meant longer stories, and more time to report them, and room to experiment with tone and sound and style.
But, these doubts continued to make themselves known, and one time, in front of an audience. Sam was invited to be part of a panel at McGill University in Montreal.
Sam Evans-Brown: The panel was a reporter for Vice News stationed in Montreal; a freelance reporter who mostly wrote in The Guardian; and then me… And I don't remember the question that prompted it. But but it was something along those lines of like, like, ‘does journalism change the world?’ And and the gentleman who wrote mostly for The Guardian was like, ‘journalism does not change the world. Social movements change the world. And I use journalism to give cover for social movements. And if the editors of the at The Guardian ever realized this, they will fire me.’
And I was just like, whoa! And at the time, it was it was very challenging for me at the time because I like, you know, I had never really thought that much about like, like what is my theory of change, right? I was just like, ‘I'm doing this journalism thing. I'm trying to do it as well as I can.’
And it was the first time where I was like, oh, like, who is at the wheel right, of society?
MUX IN: The Farmhouse, Silver Maple, instruments stem
Justine Paradis: Things really started to turn during the pandemic. Sam wasn’t able to do some of his favorite parts of the job, like recording in-person, out in the field. Other members of the team were burnt-out, and the future of the show felt kinda unclear. But beyond that, Sam was continuing to ask himself a basic question: it’s a climate crisis. Is this type of journalism even helping?
MUX FADE
Justine Paradis: You said something to me. Um. You said: sometimes I worry that what we're doing is just entertainment, or mostly entertainment.
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. Yup. I worry about that a lot. Which is not to say people don't need entertainment, but there's a lot of entertainment out there. You know?
Justine Paradis: Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: And I don't think it's just entertainment. I don't think that's, I don't think that's true. I think that, like, people do listen to our stories. And my hope is that they, like, I hope that they come away with a deeper understanding of the world that is, that is closer to, to how the world is… um. But then what do you do, what do they do with that?
Justine Paradis: And that what happened was a different job popped up on Sam’s radar. It was local… the compensation was a little better. It was a job at Clean Energy New Hampshire, which is a non-profit state advocacy group which would have him pushing for important aspects of the energy transition, off fossil fuels. This is something Sam had been reporting on for years.
But as a journalist obligated to avoid even the appearance of bias… he’d never really been allowed to say what he really thought about that. To say… this.
Sam Evans-Brown: The energy transition, like there will be, there will be losers, right? But the benefits are so manifest that it just seems like we're insane to have taken so long to get there. And that's a thing that I've, that I've just, like, come to believe really strongly. And so when this job came up, it was like a) I can do that job. Like, b) for our family’s needs, it’s here, we don’t have to go anywhere. But then c) it’s like, I will be able to work on something that I, that I essentially fully believe in.
MUX IN: Tapoco Critter, Zither stem, Blue Dot Sessions
Justine Paradis: Thank you for talking to me.
Sam Evans-Brown: No problem.
Justine Paradis: Um. Can I give you a hug?
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah!
MUX FADE
Justine Paradis: Um. Nate. Come back.
Nate Hegyi: Hey. [coughs] Let me try that ‘hey’ again, cuz it was, uh… hey!
Justine Paradis: [laughing] Little husky.
Nate Hegyi: That was a little husky there. Little allergy-ish right there.
Justine Paradis: [laughing] Well, you’ve been listening for a while.
Nate Hegyi: Hello!
Justine Paradis: So. I’m curious about your perspective on this because Sam was the host of Outside/In.
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Justine Paradis: Which is now your job.
Nate Hegyi: mmhm.
Justine Paradis: How does it feel for you hearing someone say all this about your job – and not even in the proverbial sense, but literally, precisely your job?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Yeah! I, uh, I disagree with a lot of what Sam said, to be honest with you.
Justine Paradis: Yeah. Tell me about it.
Nate Hegyi: I think. There were moments when I was listening to that, I just wanted to hop in… and be like, aw!
My first reaction: when he was getting these emails from these industry groups, being like, ‘you got this wrong, you got that wrong,’ my first thought is: it happens to every young reporter. It happened to me. And I remember being really shaken up by it when it first happened. I was also lucky enough to have a really good news director, and an editor, who would be like: ‘Listen, this happens all the time, you’re not wrong, that’s just what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna get flack.’ I am a strong believer in 4-minute news stories, and even 90-second news stories, because not everybody has 30 minutes to hear about every single topic. Like, I think sometimes it's good just to let people know: hey, this thing’s going on…
I also think that it depends on how you approach journalism as well. If you’re approaching journalism with this single-minded focus: I want to change things, then it’s never gonna be satisfying to you because things are probably not going to change. Or at least you don’t have a lot of control over that change.
Like, I've always approached my job as a journalist as: I'm a storyteller. And I’m essentially writing: and this is cheesy, I know you hear it in J-schools all the time, but you are writing the first draft of history.
When I was deep in reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic, reporting out in the Mountain West, which is a place that unvaccination rates were really high. Rampant misinformation and disinformation. And it was the closest I got to burnout probably, was reporting day-in, day-out to people: like, hey, the hospitals are completely full, and people are dying, because they’re not vaccinated but yet there’s still protests, there’s still people denying the fact that folks are dying from covid-19. And I remember just getting so frustrated with it. I was like, nothing is changing!
And I was like, that's not my job. My job is not to convince hearts and minds right now. My job at this point is to document and witness what’s happening in the Mountain West when it comes to the pandemic. That's all I can do. And that gave me a feeling of at least dull satisfaction with the situation that I was in.
Justine Paradis: [laughing]
Nate Hegyi: I was like, I'm not going to change anything, and that’s okay. Because sometimes we don’t change things.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, I actually don’t think Sam would disagree with a lot of what you’re saying, I just think he just came to a different conclusion. And, he didn’t take the new job just because he had doubts about journalism. I just, I think he was also psyched to try something new.
Nate Hegyi: I think that’s what it is. It’s about meaning. If you can come to your job every day, and say, you know, this job gives me meaning. And if you lose that feeling of purpose, then it’s a real fast track to burning out on a job, and I think we all hit it in different ways.
MUX IN: Rainbow Inside a Cloud stem, Sarah the Illstrumentalist
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee meeting
Chair Kevin Agard : Sam… uh.. Evans. Welcome.
Sam Evans-Brown: Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you to the Committee. I’m happy to be very brief. Clean Energy New Hampshire, Sam Evans-Brown. We also oppose this bill. NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that by 2030, solar panels could be as 1% of the nation’s e-waste… [fade]
Nate Hegyi: I’ve had a lot of colleagues who’ve experienced what Sam experienced and have gone into advocacy. And I’m just, I am curious, I am curious: is this something I'm HEARING about, that you’re hearing about, that is kind of anecdotal? Like, hey, everyone’s leaving, it’s part of the Great Resignation… Or is there something there?
Justine Paradis: Right. So, I tried to get a sense of that.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, there’s definitely an element of just being burnt out by journalism. Modern journalism is really hard.
Justine Paradis: But first – it’s time for a break.
Nate Hegyi: Yup! Outside/In will be right back.
// Break I //
Nate Hegyi: Okay. I’m Nate Hegyi, here with Justine Paradis.
Justine Paradis: And we’re back with the question: are people really leaving climate journalism right now?
Stephen Lacey: Yeah, there seems to be a churn happening. I'm seeing some people who are burnt out and then some people who are moving into the solutions side of things.
Justine Paradis: This is Stephen Lacey. Stephen’s been reporting on climate solutions and green tech for the past 16 years. You might know him from the show The Energy Gang, and he now runs a podcast company called Post Script Media. And Stephen said, off the top of his head, he could think of 8 or 9 people who’ve left climate journalism over the years.
Stephen Lacey: What I can't figure out is if this is just what happens in the world of journalism. Some people go into industry, some people go into advocacy, some people go through the revolving door. It happens in journalism and other spaces, but it's definitely happening at an accelerating rate right now in the climate space.
Justine Paradis: So, we’re at least not the only people observing this. And to my eye, there’s a couple reasons why people are leaving. One: being a climate journalist almost trains you to be in climate solutions.
I spoke with one journalist who left his job as senior writer with Grist after about 20 years in journalism… and he became an electrician!
Nate Hegyi: [laughs]
Justine Paradis: Partly because he says electrification is part of the energy transition, but also partly because I think he just wants to work with his hands instead of being in front of a computer, reporting kinda the same bad news he’s been reporting for decades.
Nate Hegyi: I get that. I totally get that.
Justine Paradis: And I also spoke with one of those former journalists that Stephen mentioned. Her name’s Julia Pyper.
Julia Pyper: Journalism was so deeply embedded in who I was. And I was, you know, a chair of the National Press Club when I lived in Washington, D.C. and I really thought that's how I wanted to define my life.
Jusitne: Julia dreamed of covering climate for a big audience, at a place like the New York Times. But around 2019 she instead transitioned into advocacy, and now she’s a VP at a clean tech financing company called Good Leap.
Julia Pyper: It's hard when you know so much about an issue and how big the crisis is to stay on the sidelines at some point. At least, that's how I felt. That's what tipped me over the edge of giving up my childhood dream and long-time goal of, you know, working at the New York Times to say, okay, I can live with the fact that I will spend several more decades of my life, hopefully, you know, working on the solutions themselves. And the dream is going to evolve now because I see just how critical this issue is.
Justine Paradis: A second reason people are leaving climate journalism is that it’s just hard to be a journalist, on pretty much any beat, and each beat is hard for its own specific reasons. Here’s Stephen Lacey again.
Stephen Lacey: Yeah… The newsroom is just a tough place to be right now for everyone. And when you pile on this historic story that feels unstoppable and like not enough people are paying attention, that is a recipe for severe burnout and a need for a change of pace.
Justine Paradis: So, I also put the question to Meaghan Parker. She’s the executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, or SEJ. Are we observing more people leaving climate journalism to go into climate action?
She says the environment beat is notoriously unstable – as in, when budgets take a hit, especially in local newsrooms, it’s historically one of the first beats to get axed, especially following the 2008 recession.
Meaghan Parker: It was not seen as a core issue. You know, it was not seen as core news… editors coming out of the politics desk: it's not politics... y’know, I firmly believe it's politics. They didn't see it as politics. So you had things like, you know, the entirety of CNN’s Science and Environment team was let go.
Nate Hegyi: Wow. I didn’t know that.
Justine Paradis: Yeah. And it’s also easy to argue that media has been complicit in the lack of meaningful climate action for decades.
Nate Hegyi: I always bristle at the term media.
Justine Paradis: Oh, yeah!
Nate Hegyi: Cuz, I mean, it’s such a varied landscape! It’s like, Grist hasn’t exactly been ignoring, you know, climate for the past 10 years. Or High Country News. Or there’s other ones. But!
Justine Paradis: Yeah, but US cable TV news is a different story. Because there, climate, for years, has been presented with a lot of both-sideism –
Nate Hegyi: Oh yeah. Coverage that gives space to climate deniers, in order to perform objectivity, or showing that you’re politically “balanced.”
Justine Paradis: And even today, climate doesn’t get much air-time on cable news. Here’s Julia Pyper again.
Julia Pyper: That’s a place where I think the climate coverage has not fully broken through. I would have loved to work in TV. I started my career interning at 60 Minutes. That was the dream…. But… one funny little stat around that is that Jeff Bezos got more coverage on morning shows the day he went to space as climate change got in all of 2020.
MUX IN: Houston BBQ instruments stem, Sarah the Illustrumentalist
Justine Paradis: The reason all this is important – is because all this affects not only the number of jobs that have existed, but also their prestige within the newsrooms, like politics have more prestige than climate.
So, if you have ambitions – as far as wanting your work to have impact, or depth, and to be rewarded or even just well-compensated for that work, the landscape of the industry might feel pretty discouraging.
But there are signs that newsrooms are starting to catch up. Maybe because the consequences of climate change are actually around us now.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Like, the West is on fire again right NOW.
Justine Paradis: That’s such an evergreen comment. Yeah, climate change is not a future thing anymore – we’re living through it. And so even though it still only made up just about 1% of airtime – climate coverage on cable TV tripled from 2020 to 2021.
Meaghan Parker: And then on top of all of this,very very recently, you see some, at the national prestige publications, a big jump in hiring. AP is hiring like twenty, something like twenty climate reporters right now. The NYT of course has probably the biggest climate desk they’ve ever had. Washington Post has been staffing up quite a bit.
Justine Paradis: And Meaghan said that the crowd at this year’s SEJ conference was more diverse than ever in terms of gender and race.
Meaghan Parker: it represents a huge influx of of new early career younger journalists coming into the field and really motivated to cover climate and environment.
Justine Paradis: So, what is it we’re witnessing?
Well, I can’t say that there’s some major exodus of climate reporters, it actually seems like the overall number is probably growing, at least at a national level. BUT…
Meaghan Parker: When you talk about people leaving the field, you're talking about people sort of later in sort of that mid-career stage. And I think that's where we have a real problem.
Justine Paradis: Because when you lose mid-career journalists, what you’re losing is experience. Remember the haranguing emails that had Sam grinding his teeth at night?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Mmhm.
Justine Paradis: It wasn’t just the mouthguard that helped.
Sam Evans-Brown: What's happening is they know that you're like a 20-something-year-old kid who's been given this, like, tool that is of outsized power to your, the amount of knowledge that you have about the subject and that you are pressurable. That like rather than like grind your teeth into dust, you will stop writing things that they don't want you to write. And the tool that you have as a reporter against that is confidence that you're right… the more you learn, the more you start to realize that, like, I do know what's going on.
Justine Paradis: That takes so long!
Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, it's like part of the reason why journalism is an impossible task, because newsrooms are cash strapped and… we’re just sending these kids into the world to, like, cover what's happening.
[MUX: when i hop, baegel]
Justine Paradis: Alright. We’ve heard from people who have left journalism. But I also spoke with someone who chose to stay. That’s after the break.
Nate Hegyi: And as you’ve been hearing… the funding of journalism is no simple matter. But one thing I really do love about the public radio model is that it honestly really does rely on listener support. If you’re so inspired, you can contribute at our website – go to outsideinradio.org/donate. And thank you. Okay – be back in a minute.
////////// BREAK ////////////
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Justine Paradis: And I’m Justine Paradis.
Nate Hegyi: And this is Kendra.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: My name is Kendra Pierre-Louis, and I'm a senior reporter for the Gimlet Spotify podcast How to Save a Planet.
Justine Paradis: We’ve had Kendra on the show before, and featured episodes of the show she works on – How to Save a Planet – which we’ll get to in a second. But before the job she has now, Kendra was a reporter at the NYT climate desk. So, she was working at what is considered a very elite publication – the “paper of record.”
Justine Paradis: So why did you leave the NYT?
Kendra Pierre-Louis: Um. I was really unhappy. That’s why.
Justine Paradis: Fair enough!
Kendra Pierre-Louis: When I left the Times, I was very much like… maybe I’ll go work at Mcdonalds. Like, I was DONE. You know? And no disrespect to people who work at McDonald’s. I was just very, kind of like – [laughing]
Justine Paradis: You were done with journalism.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: [laughing] I was done with journalism.
MUX IN: Fallin’, Pandaraps
Justine Paradis: Part of Kendra’s unhappiness at the NYT – had to do with the way she was covering climate change.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: So much of the work that I was doing before was sort of articulating the problem and kind of pummeling people with facts, but very little about what they could do about those facts. And so I think I was getting bummed out because there's only so much time and energy that you can sort of spend chronicling kind of the harm that's happening to the planet without feeling something. But also, I just didn't feel it was fully useful to readers because what we know needs to happen for climate change is we need broad systemic change. And that means everyone needs to be a part of a broad, systemic change. But telling you that the moose are dying because of climate change doesn't really give you an entry point into fixing the problem.
Justine Paradis: Right. You're just hearing about this really, really sad thing.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: Yeah. And I think… even the people who know climate is a problem and really want to be engaged with it, they don't want to read a climate story because they know that they're sort of setting themselves up to be bummed out.
Justine Paradis: Another reason Kendra was unhappy – had to do with what the workplace was like for her, what it felt like to work there. And actually, maybe those issues aren’t unconnected.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: You know, I'm a black woman and I joined the Times right after a mass exodus of journalists of color. And I left right before another mass exodus. So there are like huge structural issues with the institution. And I think that trickles down to how they choose to cover climate.
Justine Paradis: Oh yeah? How so?
Kendra Pierre-Louis: Um, this is like tiny, but in I was there at the Times for a little over two and a half years, and in that time I was only able to do two stories that touched on ecojustice, for example, because climate was considered an activist issue and race is considered an activist issue, and so combining them are two activist issues. And you're just sort of like, but it's reality. Like, I don't like, I don't understand.
Nate Hegyi: Huh. Like, my reaction is: I’m really happy I don’t work at the NYT [laughs].
Justine Paradis: I know right?
Nate Hegyi: I’ve heard this complaint from a lot of colleagues of mine who have been journalists of color, though, at public radio stations I’ve been at as well.
Justine Paradis: Yeah. It’s not unique to the New York Times, you’re right. I think it’s a problem in public radio and journalism in general. But a big question I want to talk about here: when it comes to climate, what is the line between journalism and advocacy?
Nate Hegyi: Um. So, example comes to mind. Wyoming and its energy transition. Right now, Wyoming is super reliant on oil and gas, and there’s a push to build more wind farms there. You know, if you were to look at the wind farms that’re being built there, as completely uncritical: this is a great thing for climate, this is a great thing for everything, we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, without looking at the downsides of that? I think that’s advocacy. You have to look at how people’s lives a re going to be affected by this change, by this transition.If you can look at the transition like that from all the different perspectives, that’s journalism. But if you’re just looking at this: this is the one solution, there’s no downsides, that’s advocacy.
Justine Paradis: But some of those perspectives are essentially informed by misinformation which is spread by fossil fuel companies, right? Who are willingly inserting falsehoods into that debate. So we should include those perspectives at all?
Nate Hegyi: That’s where it gets complicated. Like in the past, if I had a quote from a fossil fuels spokesperson, and it had falsities in it, I would include the quote and then afterwards point out, hey, what they just said is not true. But is that, like…
Justine Paradis: But is that elevating it? Should you do that? Like, when you’re facing a problem as big as this, should the identity of what journalism is change?
Nate Hegyi: Should the rules of journalism change?
Justine Paradis: Should the rules change? Yes. And that’s what Kendra thinks.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: I think that the kind of journalism that is dominant now is ineffective and not up to the task of the social threats and the social changes that we need to usher in. And I think too much gets hidden behind this idea of “unbiased”…
I have a pro-Earth bias. I joke all the time. Like, you should! Right?
MUX IN: St. Augustine Rhodia RingSyn Stem
Like we are, we're dependent on this planet for our existence. And it's bizarre to me that climate is in many ways seen as an activist issue, that we feel like you can't do a certain thing without inserting what are clear fossil fuel company talking points.
Justine Paradis: So, eventually, Kendra left the Times, she got recruited – and joined How to Save a Planet. So, instead of leaving journalism, she left a certain kind of journalism, and pivoted, very intentionally, to a new approach. An approach aptly named ‘solutions journalism.’
MUX OUT
Kendra Pierre-Louis: One of the things that I think that we do really well on How to Save a Planet is help people understand the pinch points in society, the pinch points towards the climate transition where they can engage in. Like finding those places where people don't know, like, oh, this is an entry point, oh, this is an entry point. So in a lot of ways, you know, I say it’s solutions journalism in the sense because we're focused on climate solutions. But I also think of it as sort of like… civics journalism. You know, like this is how the world works.
Justine Paradis: Right? Like, you can't go out and nurse the moose back to health, but maybe there's something else you can do.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: Yeah. And. And not just ‘there's something else you can do,’ but: and here are people doing it.
Justine Paradis: Here are people doing it – things like creating funding models to renovate leaky, inefficient buildings at scale; combining solar arrays with grazing livestock; reforesting the ocean floor, with kelp.
MUX IN: Sunday Sound Bath Stems
Kendra Pierre-Louis: It's changed the way I approach the framing. It changed the way, it changed what I look for. It changed the way. Everything. Who I talk to is different now. Yeah, everything.
Justine Paradis: And you know how Sam dreaded all of the emails he’d get from industry reps after he published a story? Well that’s changed for Kendra too. The audience response to her stories are totally different than before.
Kendra Pierre-Louis: A lot more “thank you.” A lot more, you know, we get emails from listeners that tell us that like they now know what they're going to study in college. We get mails from listeners telling us how they pivoted their careers… how they've pushed for legislative changes or how they've successfully opposed… fossil fuel expansion in their communities, things like that.
MUX POST AND FADE
Justine Paradis: This was game-changing, for Kendra. But to be clear: I’m not saying that solutions journalism is the solution for everybody. We do still need reporters covering climate impacts like wildfires and heat waves and storms…
But it was a way for Kendra to remain in journalism. And for me solutions journalism does help me consider the question we’re wrestling with here: it’s a climate emergency. Is journalism up to the task? And does it matter?
MUX IN: Rainbow inside a cloud, Sarah the Illstrumentalist
Nate Hegyi: Alright, so… all great stories have to come to an end. How do we end this, Justine? How does this story end?
Justine Paradis: The ending… so… Taylor and I talked a bunch about this and I keep resisting doing my own story for it… I dunno… I guess I feel resistant to it, everyone feels this way, this isn’t really about me. Um, but…
Nate Hegyi: I’m interested. I wanna know. I feel like this is like a journey for you as a storyteller, because it’s very much a story that looks inward. How did you feel? Where do you land with journalism right now?
[pause]
Justine Paradis: Engh.
Nate Hegyi: [laughing] that was a great sound!
Justine Paradis: [laughing] I guess I’ll just tell you why I started this story a little bit. And I started it a year ago when I had the impulse to interview Sam about this.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: Because I do fear that we’re just making entertainment, for people who, in essence, agree.
I want to feel like I can have impact when it comes to climate, beyond like, biking to work. Beyond my personal life. Because that’s what’s necessary, right? Systems.
But as journalists, there’s certain stuff we can’t do. We can’t run for office, I can’t run for president [laughs].
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, oh, yeah.
Justine Paradis: Often, can’t sign petitions, in certain contexts, can’t go to protests. That sort of thing. So if our journalism, if my journalism is just entertainment, that doesn’t feel good to me.
And this was all kind of running through my head at the same time that I was seeing some pretty bad headlines about Antarctic ice sheets, thinking about the place I grew up, which is an island. Like, how much longer will that even exist?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: And the wheat crisis, and a lot of things were just coming up for me in a moment of real high anxiety. And I ended up seeking out a podcast about climate. It’s called Warm Regards. And it was an episode with one of the authors of the latest IPCC report from the UN. And he was just so much more optimistic than I am right now, or was in that moment. Like he wasn’t Pollyanna. Not naive. But he made this argument that like, look: three degrees is exponentially worse than 2.5 degrees, of warming over preindustrial levels. 2.5 is way worse than 1.5. And, so, there’s literally no moment in which climate action doesn’t make sense. It always makes sense. And it got me thinking about how those horrifying headlines just had me in this position of, like, oh it’s over. It’s too late. And it’s not over! And that’s an impartial truth also, right?
Nate Hegyi: Right! Right.
Justine Paradis: So those headlines did one thing, of making – I don’t know “making” me feel, but I felt this thing that isn’t true. And it’s kind of interesting because the longer piece was pretty nitty-gritty, and that speaks to the four-minute piece or the headline vs. do you have an hour to spend?
Nate Hegyi: Right. Yeah! Because the thing that brought you up was a podcast.
Justine Paradis: Yeah, was a piece of climate journalism. So, my answer is ‘it’s complicated,’ Nate, as usual.
Nate Hegyi: As usual. Isn’t it all complicated, yeah.
Justine Paradis: Yup.
[mux: Being Nostalgic, FLYIN]
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This episode was produced, reported, and mixed by Justine Paradis. Special thanks to Nate Johnson and to Peter Howe. He is one of the authors of the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, which tracks attitudes and beliefs about climate change in the United States. That survey found that even though most Americans believe global warming is happening, only a third talk about climate change at least occasionally with friends and family –
Peter Howe: That's the first thing that I recommend people do is try to talk about it more and to talk about it in the context of of what they value.
Nate Hegyi: So, let’s talk about it! Has a piece of journalism about the climate ever tangibly impacted your life? Have you made changes in your community based on someone’s reporting?
We wanna know what you think. And, not for nothing, you should probably tell that journalist too. It tends to mean a lot.
There’s lots of ways to get in touch with us and with other listeners, but a great one is tweeting at us. We are @OutsideInRadio. And we often share your responses in our newsletter, which is free. You can sign up to get it every two weeks at outsideinradio.org.
This episode was edited by Taylor Quimby, with help from me, Nate Hegyi, Rebecca Lavoie, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt.
Music in this episode by Sarah the Illstrumentalist, Daniel Fridell, baegel, FLYIN, Smartface, Silver Maple, By Lotus, 91nova, Moon Craters, and Blue Dot Sessions.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is listener-supported. If you’re able to donate, it means a lot. The link is in the show notes, or you can head to outsideinradio.org/donate.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.