Environmental Journalism in 2014
What is your vision of how the public will track environmental issues and developments in five years?
Online journalism has had a profound impact on the way people experience the news. The ability to link, ability to comment and amount of storage space allows for an interaction with the news not possible with print media. One of the most valuable things about the set up of Dot Earth is that is allows for experts to directly comment and engage with the material. Problems that face coverage of environmental issues in print, like not having enough room to do justice to a certain issue, don’t take the same form in online media.
During the past few years I have been amazed at how multimedia journalism has developed. I think the ability for science journalists to provide compelling visualizations of environmental issues will change the way these issues are tracked and discussed. Lack of visual appeal has been a problem environmental journalism in print media has faced. If people are able to interact with a multimedia depiction of an environmental concern this may make it easier for people to better understand the complexities of environmental problems.
Answering this question becomes complicated when desconstructing what exactly the “public” is and how exactly the public or publics track environmental issues and developments right now. Communities, business leaders, government agencies, environmental groups and others all have their own modes of discourse and communication when it comes to environmental issues. Our discussion in class touched on the development of hyperlocal news sites – it will be interesting to see if the hyperlocal could open up new ways for people to engage with environmental issues in their community. In their full potential hyperlocal sites might provide the ability for communities to connect with other communities internationally who have a common interest in a particular environmental issue.
Environmental organizations have the ability more than ever to connect with people through social media – some are doing it well while others aren’t, but this will continue to evolve over the next five years. Grist is an example of an online magazine focused on environmental that has had some success using social media. Independent media and online publications all have to potential to develop new ways to track environmental issues.
