ABSTRACT
Exactly what constitutes environmental journalism has become more difficult to define in today’s crowded multimedia and social media landscape. While environmental journalism is a relatively new reporting specialty, having started in the 1960s (Friedman, 1999, 2004; Wyss, 2008), within its relatively short span, it has undergone many changes. These changes continue today at a faster pace, driven by journalism’s changing business model, media convergence and the rise of the Internet. This chapter discusses many of the changes that have affected environmental journalism over time in the United States. It focuses on the United States because, while some of these changes also have occurred in other countries, different media structures, ownership histories and styles have provided varying results in other nations. For example, while a decline in the traditional newspaper business model has been evident in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, it does not seem to be affecting large Asian countries such as China and India, where newspaper readership is expanding. And no journalism crisis was felt by science journalists-who often cover environmental issues-in Latin America, Asia and North and Southern Africa, in contrast to science journalists’ crisis concerns in the United States, Europe and Canada (Bauer et al., 2013). Before tracing changes in environmental journalism over a long timeline, this chapter reminds readers that the mass media are not the only source of environmental information for people. It then introduces some early predecessors of environmental coverage and tracks varying cycles of public interest and environmental coverage in the United States from the 1970s to the early years of the new decade. Moving closer to the present, it discusses the impacts that media convergence and downsizing have had on environmental coverage in newspapers and on television and focuses on actions to eliminate the environmental “beat,” using the New York Times as an example. The chapter then examines some of the positive and negative effects that the Internet has had on U.S. environmental coverage and presents examples of selected traditional media websites, online publications and news aggregators, and some of the changes they have faced. After briefly reviewing several prizewinning multimedia examples of investigative environmental reporting, the chapter looks to the future and additional changes that might be needed to make environmental journalism a more compelling topic for both traditional media and Internet readers and viewers in the United States.
