Green media catches a buzz

Green media is moving up that ‘long tail.’ While environmental issues may not beat the major stories in the popular press – Brittney Spears, Kate Middleton and Paris Hilton – editors are keenly aware that climate change, energy and development are related. Listeners, viewers and readers can smell the news. Editors follow.

Journalists, typically a curious lot, follow their noses to important stories with broad affect. Take the story of China Business News environmental reporter Zhang Ke. After listening to a city official’s glowing view of water and air quality, Zhang investigated, found a serious water pollution source and wrote about it. The deputy mayor resigned.

Zhang Ke had participated in a workshop on environmental journalism organized by InterNews and the Capital Youth Journalism Association. Internews, a media training and development organization, founded the Earth Journalism Network (EJN) to assist and promote local reporting on environmental issues. Its training programs have focused on developing regions – Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. EJN, launched in 2004, has been financially supported by Humbolt State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation and Rockefeller Financial Services.

Training programs for journalists – in the developed and developing worlds – are meant to overcome the greatest stigma attached to environmental reporting – scientific gobble-de-goop. Award winning New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert told College of William and Mary (US) students last spring (2006), “I’m not an expert on global warming. I’m not a physicist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a chemist, a biologist, or a climatologist. I’m not a scientist. But I do something that scientists don’t do—I tell stories.”

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“Passion” Doubles Ad Sales
It was long ago, deep in the last century when any local media outlet reported doubling its ad sales. This is the age of Google and YouTube. And the rage. Traditional media – meaning all media other than websites and mobile phones – can’t, according to conventional wisdom, compete for advertising. “Passion” shows all that is wrong.

Just How Does International News Coverage Fit Into A Newspaper Going Local, Local, Local?
An Editor & Publisher article had an energy reporter for a US newspaper asking, “How do you get the time to write (about international issues) when you need to be out writing about hometown problems?” Easy – relate those international issues to hometown problems.

Major World Journalist Organizations Reject Government-imposed or Suggested Codes of Conduct, Guidelines, or Even New Laws Restricting Freedom of the Press In Response To The Danish Cartoons, But They Agree That Journalists Should Not Create Unnecessary Tension By Promoting Hatred Or Inciting Violence.
Major news organizations including the International Federation of Jounalists (IFJ) and several all-news channels have held separate meetings in the past days to discuss the Danish cartoon controversy and to determine what has been learned and what needs to be done to prevent similar distress in the future.

New Orleans Media Ban Overturned
CNN sought and was granted a restraining order against US authorities in New Orleans.

To Attract the Young Think of 10 Year-Old Editors!
Three Hugely Successful French National Daily Newspapers Team Up With the Miami Herald To Test If Their Formula Is Exportable to Anglo-Saxons

The stories are out there, though still often relegated to back pages and fringe air-times. Traditional journalism tends to elevate two kinds of stories: news and controversy. Global warming is no longer news nor even controversial, except from pockets of troglodytes.

The editorial pattern in media coverage of environmental issues still fits these two basic models. Local issues with an environmental hook get local attention. Zhang Ke’s reporting on pollution in a Chinese city was as much a sidebar to the main story of a lying government official. It’s the tried and true ‘here, me, now’ news model: people are interested in what’s happening HERE, to ME, right NOW.

Media coverage of last summer’s Live Earth concerts and broadcasts tended to focus not on impact or message but rather on audience figures lower than Live Aid, or football, or Big Brother.

Global media – unusually filled with environmental troglodytes – often takes a different direction: global warming is happening somewhere else, with pictures, please. MTV Networks International (MTVNI) viewers in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East are offered the colorful and imaginative Element, a television series developed by the Television Trust for the Environment, Internews Europe and the One World Broadcasting Trust. MTVNI’s multi-media MTV Switch was launched in June, a “youth-focused, global, multi-platform campaign created to help slow down the acceleration of global warming.”

The Nobel Committee’s decision awarding the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert (Al) Gore notes the connection between science and media. The world’s most prestigious honor was awarded, said the Committee’s statement, “…for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

IPCC scientists collected and analyzed the data. Al Gore has become the very public face of that now irrefutable knowledge. The Nobel Committee said he is “…the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”

Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was awarded 2007 Academy Award (Oscar) for best documentary and has been shown in over 100 countries since it’s 2006 release. His long, well documented political career was preceded by five years as a journalist for The Tennessean. During his US Army service in VietNam he was a reporter, most often writing press releases but occasionally an article for Stars and Stripes.

"This (climate change) is not a political issue but a moral and spiritual challenge," said Gore, after the award was announced.

“No,” said a spokesperson for US President George W. Bush when asked if the Nobel Peace Prize would affect current US environmental policies. The US Presidential election, always a major worldwide media event, will be held in just over a year.