The Climate Desk: A Journalistic Collaboration

This Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. Back in 1970, some 20 million people are estimated to have participated in activities and protests of various kinds, some of them captured by a hour-long CBS News special report, “Earth Day: A Question of Survival,” narrated by Walter Cronkite.

To watch that report on YouTube is to crack a time capsule—the hair, the teach-ins, a young Dan Rather—but also to absorb a message that is depressingly familiar, particularly the 2:40 minute concluding jeremiad from Cronkite about how Americans need to reform their ways. And we did reform in many ways. The air and rivers are cleaner, there’s less litter, bald eagles have rebounded, and so forth. But the environmental problems that seemed so dire then seem simple by comparison to the ones we confront now, principally climate change. And has journalism risen to the task of explaining these complexities, not only the scientific ones, which are daunting enough, but the competing proposals and interests among the politicians, policy makers, and technologists? Mostly the answer is, not really.

Why? Well, climate change is slow-moving, vast, and often overwhelming for news organizations to grapple with, especially in a time of dwindling resources. What coverage there is tends to be compartmentalized—science, technology, politics, and business and covered by different teams or “desks,” despite the intrinsic connections. Coverage is also too often fixated on imperiled wildlife, political gamesmanship, or the “debate” over the existence of climate change, all at the expense of advancing the bigger story—how we’re going to address, mitigate, or adapt to it.

In sum, it’s a huge story, perhaps the biggest story of our lifetime, but the traditional structures of journalism aren’t configured to reporting it well. Thinking about this problem we wondered, what if someone were to pull together a range of news organizations—with their various skill sets and their audiences—to take on this story together? And so a group of editors met to discuss if such an unprecedented collaboration could work.

Four months later we’re so excited to introduce the Climate Desk, an ongoing project dedicated to exploring the impact—human, environmental, economic, political—of a changing climate. The partners in this endeavor are The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired, and PBS’ new public affairs show Need To Know. Our pilot project, running over the next two weeks, will address how business is attempting to adapt to the changes—both meteorological and regulatory—that will accompany global warming. Stories will run on the sites of the partner organizations and on theclimatedesk.org. (You can also follow the collaboration on Facebook and on Twitter.) It’s been a lot of hard work, a ton of fun, and we’ve only just begun. So check it out, tell us what you think and what we should tackle next.
 

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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