What I saw in local climate news this year
I beg of you, focus on your headlines.
Welcome back to The Planet You Save May Be Your Own, a weekly newsletter on local & state climate action.
I’m Taylor Kate Brown and this newsletter grows by word-of-mouth. Someone share or forward this edition with you? Sign up here. You can also read and share this edition online
Programming note: This is the last free newsletter edition of 2023 - I’ll be taking next week off and sending the bonus edition for paid members on December 28th.
(A photo of the San Francisco Chronicle masthead sign waiting to go up on the wall in the renovated newsroom on my last day there in 2021)
I feel strongly about the importance of local, quality news. I wrote about it in the world’s most international website; I worked at a local newspaper; I started my career at one of the many late-aughts “local news experiments” now picked over for spare parts.
The overall picture of local news coverage hasn't improved in the past few years, but there are bright spots. These days, the lows and highs of local news comes to me through climate and energy reporting, as I read through many, many stories to share some of them with you each week.
So what does that feel like at the end of 2023? Here’s a few things I’m seeing.
The good stuff (behind a paywall)
In some ways, there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to quality climate reporting, but much of it is national, and behind paywalls. I’m happy to see more publications offering gift links for subscribers (which I use heavily when I can) but I wonder how long that will be around if those links ultimately do not drive subscriptions.
In local media, the best climate reporters and teams I’m aware of fall into both free-to-read and paywalled publications. Bridge Michigan is a repeat guest in the TPYS link section, as well as my own work with Floodlight, rely on donations from large funders and individuals, sometimes eschewing advertising entirely. But there are lots of other local news nonprofits, some well established, some fighting to even get started, that have plenty of potential stories to cover.
The Boston Globe has an exceptionally hard paywall, and their climate team operates with a very specific strategy that both plays to reporters’ beats and involves the wider newsroom. While it’s wildly frustrating that I can’t include their stories in this newsletter, I don’t begrudge them that choice: it’s a large regional news outlet saying what they do has value, and recognizing mass nationwide traffic from viral stories is not a long-term strategy for a regional news outlet. And the Globe’s climate team just announced they were hiring three new people.
The headline trap
I hear a lot of people profess to hate clickbait headlines — I do myself! But the math ain’t mathing here folks — however people particularly feel about a headline, those headlines are still getting clicked. If the bad feelings contin ue after the click still happens, or the clicker decides this story has no relevance to their life and immediately forgets everything about the story, everybody is worse off. When I made headline suggestions at The Chronicle, my strategy was about getting the most compelling parts of the story in the headline: the parts that would get the largest number of people who would read the story and (hopefully) feel like this is relevant and interesting to them.
So forgive me when I see headlines like this and desperately wish they had chosen clickbait:
I don’t particularly want to pick on these authors. I have come across dozens of examples of headlines so boring they’re physically painful, headlines seem to actively resist the idea the underlying story might get read by human or computer. In most local media landscapes, reporters and editors are being asked to do what feels like six jobs, five of which they received little to no training on. The time it takes to write an intentional, accurate and compelling headline, especially if that headline has to also fit at the top of a newspaper column, is often time they do not have and a skill that has not been practiced.
But when it comes to local climate reporting, an accurate and compelling headline is one of few real tools we have for reaching people on climate issues who aren’t already highly engaged activists. There are plenty of structural issues with local media that prevents good, factual climate stories from getting written or produced, but when they do happen, it’s essential they actually get read or watched.
Okay, that’s probably worth a totebag
One of the bright spots I’ve seen, especially over the past year, in local climate news are local public radio stations and their websites. I regularly link to stories from WBUR (in Boston) and Colorado Public Radio, not because I’m particularly prioritizing those websites, but because the stories are consistently good (AND HAVE GOOD HEADLINES).
Public radio reporters are also some of the more collaborative-minded folks I’ve ever come across. I was fortunate when reporting a story about insurance and LNG terminals for Floodlight, Halle Parker at WWNO offered (through my editor) contact details for a few people in Plaquemines Parish, a place my story centered on, but I never stepped foot in. Her stories are really good, and if you’re in Louisiana, essential.
Of course, I’m just one person, and there’s probably plenty of good reporting and stories I’m missing. I always want to hear about them — reply to any of the emails or send a message to hello@theplanetyousave.com.
More local climate stories
- Idaho is getting its own greenhouse gas reduction plan
- Wind energy is coming to the Gulf of Mexico (Louisiana Illuminator)
- Are we funding the right things in helping coal communities transition? (Yahoo News)
- We went to the first EV charging station funded by the Federal Infrastructure Law (Inside Climate News)