The Journalism in Climate Change Websites: Their Distinct Forms of Specialism, Content, and Role Perceptions

ABSTRACT

Survey results from news consumers around the world suggest that specialist or niche websites covering climate change are now one of the most important sources of climate information. However, there is very little detailed scholarship about these sites. We carried out semi-structured interviews with senior representatives of 14 online information sites, based in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries, which prioritize the provision of climate information following journalistic values. Through qualitative analysis of the interviews, we show how the sites carve out their niche authority and distinctive nature by emphasizing (to different degrees) their scientific expertise, relevance for policy communication, and their complementary contribution to the work of mainstream journalism. They offer a multiplicity of specialized content, broadly divided into certain, often discrete, aspects of climate change. The self-declared role perceptions of the interviewees suggest that traditional, professional journalistic values eschewing overt advocacy still predominate, although some of the practices, norms and priorities associated with these values have shifted, particularly in their roles as effective and authoritative mediators of climate science. At the theoretical level, the findings highlight the need to study “the niche” at the intersection of broader dimensions of authority, power and knowledge in changing media ecologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• online journalism
• specialism
• ‌role perceptions
• advocacy‌
• semi-structured interviews

Introduction

The volume of academic research on climate communication, in general, is vast and expanding (Nisbet et al. 2017). It includes as subsets climate change in the media (Schäfer and Schlichting 2014), and climate journalism in the Global South (Kunelius, Nossek, and Eide 2017; Schäfer and Painter 2021) and Global North (Robbins and Wheatley 2021). However, there is very little focused research on climate specialist sites. These sites represent an example of “niche” journalism, defined by the degree of specialism in the subject matter. In the case of climate change, this can mean a sharper focus on one or more subtopics, such as climate science, politics, impacts, or policy responses. Niche climate sites do not necessarily imply niche audiences defined by reach, market value or specialist interest. But they do play a particular role in the information and communication “ecology” shaped by scientific authority, climate politics and mainstream journalism.

The omission of climate specialist sites from the literature is important for four main reasons: first, there is compelling evidence that these sites are now regularly consumed by large audiences across the globe and influence key policy makers (Newman 2020); secondly, at a time when traditional and digital-born media outlets are changing the volume, format, and focus of their climate change coverage¹, climate sites demand closer scrutiny as to how their specialized content stands out in comparison to other media; thirdly, in the context of greater pressure on governments and society to take far-reaching and rapid measures to stem greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC 2021), it becomes more pertinent to assess the extent to which the specialist journalists at climate sites feel the need or pressure, particularly from NGOs, activists and scientists, to challenge neutrality and become in some sense “advocates for urgent climate action”.

Finally, the professionals employed by climate sites work in a particular setting different to that of mainstream journalists. It is characterized by a thematically focused editorial community, which is often less restricted by commercial pressures but more by the need for outside funding; and it aims its content at a specialized and not a general audience. Yet they still identify as journalists. An empirical but explorative approach to these specialized “niche” (journalism) sites has the potential, at a more theoretical level, to inform our understanding of how a news topic like climate change (with exceptional transnational significance and particular networks of power and knowledge) shapes their professional practices, role perceptions and identity.

Climate information niche or specialist websites have proliferated over the past 15 years, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom but not exclusively there (Boykoff and Yulsman 2013; Brainard 2015). Some scholars (e.g., Gibson 2017) have argued that niche sites, in general, might only reach small audiences who are already well-informed about climate change, resulting in echo-chambers of like-minded publics. However, a 2020 survey of news consumption in 40 countries suggests that specialist outlets covering climate issues rank third for general audiences as a source of climate news (Newman 2020). According to this survey, television was the most common source for gaining informing about climate change (35%), but specialized climate news outlets (13%) came just behind the online sites of major news organizations (15%) and more than social media and blogs (9%).

No studies have been published which map the reach, engagement levels or impact of such sites via their home pages, social media dissemination or bespoke newsletters. However, some of the better-resourced climate niche sites can speak to considerable “success”, when measured against other climate-focused organizations. In the United States, the climate niche site Grist registered 640,000 visits to its site in January 2022, Climate Central 360,000 and Yale Climate Communications 300,000.² These figures compare not unfavorably with the world’s most prestigious climate science organization (the IPCC) which received 670,000 visits, the climate site for the US government agency NOAA 610,000, and one of the main US climate activist groups (350.org) 150,000. In the United Kingdom, Carbon Brief reached 560,000 visits in the same month³, which compare with much lower figures for the main government advisory body in the United Kingdom, the Climate Change Committee (58,000) and the site of the UK’s main skeptical group (the GWPF) at less than 50,000. Many of these climate niche sites boast long lists of key policy makers amongst their readers⁴, and some like Inside Climate News claim to have a widespread impact, through their stories, on policy and human lives.⁵

The rise of climate niche sites was in part driven by collapsing or changing business models for traditional media and a resulting decline in specialist coverage there (Boykoff and Yulsman 2013; Brainard 2015; Schäfer and Painter 2021). As a result of newsroom cuts, particularly in the United States, many environment or climate reporters moved either to “digital-born” news organizations, such as Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vox and Vice (Painter et al. 2016) or to online niche sites covering climate issues (Brüggemann 2017; Gibson 2017), or to providing their own newsletter service (Hopke 2021). These online niche sites are different to digital-born providers like Vox, Huffington Post and BuzzFeed in that for the latter, climate change represents only a part of their news offer (Painter, Kristiansen, and Schäfer 2018); the business models of many of the climate sites are based much more on donations, foundations and philanthropy (not digital advertising); and their reliance on “shareability” via an array of social media platforms is much less pronounced than for the digital-born outlets (Küng 2016).

Most studies of climate journalism or journalists have tended to focus on those working in mainstream media (e.g., Engesser and Brüggemann 2016; Robbins and Wheatley 2021). Of the few which have included climate niche sites, mention has been made of how they have recruited former environment specialist journalists (Painter 2016), their approaches to advocacy (Fahy 2017), their relationship with science and scientists (Brüggemann 2017), and their different approaches to content production and provision (Schäfer and Painter 2021). But we know little about how journalists at climate niche sites define their special place, task and contribution, and particularly how their journalistic content differs from one site to another, and to mainstream journalism. They operate in a diffuse space where the science communication efforts, political campaigning and manipulation, activism and traditional journalism continuously intersect and overlap. For their specialized climate journalism to carve out a niche in which to make itself both relevant and to offer added value, this landscape means constant “negotiation” of what makes their work distinct.

Recent, extensive monitoring of print coverage in English-speaking countries strongly suggests that with the exception of some conservative media outlets, most Western journalists have moved on from “false balance” (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), and are currently not driven by notions of balance and objectivity to include skeptical voices (McAllister 2021). In a similar fashion, Brüggemann and Engesser (2017) found that environment journalists from India and four countries in the Global North (Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland) had for the most part, moved beyond the norm of balance and beyond quoting decontextualized skeptical voices towards a more “interpretive pattern of journalism”. This interpretative community shares the same type of sources, namely “scientific journals, IPCC reports, and climate scientists from their respective national contexts” (Brüggemann and Engesser 2014, 419). Other research suggests that although climate journalists around the world, including in the Global South, still articulate a basic conception of Western journalistic professionalism (e.g., detachment and accuracy), some are rethinking their professional practices in the light of their particular location at the cross-roads of climate journalism, science and policy (Kunelius, Nossek, and Eide 2017). However, the detailed research available on role perceptions among climate or environmental journalists in the Global South is generally absent (Schäfer and Painter 2021) or dated (Shanahan 2009).

There is mixed evidence about a possible shift in some media outlets towards weak advocacy roles (e.g., pressing for more climate action from governments) or hard advocacy roles (e.g., supporting NGO campaigns or actively starting their own initiatives such the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign⁶) (Lester 2013; Sachsman, Simon, and Valenti 2010; Strauss 2021; Schäfer and Painter 2021). Some research has suggested that an advocacy role is particularly present among online journalists and digital-born news media in the United States (Tandoc and Takahashi 2014), and that Vice in particular follows an editorial agenda sympathetic to climate activism (Painter, Kristiansen, and Schäfer 2018). However, in contrast, Robbins and Wheatley (2021) found a strong push back to the idea that mainstream climate reporters were becoming more “activist”, by “asserting that reporting evidence and scientific reality does not equate to advocacy” (12). In a similar fashion, Strauss et al. (2021) found that the advocacy role received a relatively low ranking in a survey answered by 42 reporters covering climate change at mainstream media in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, compared to other journalistic norms (e.g., independence, neutrality, accuracy, and objectivity).

With this context in mind, we focus on three main research questions (RQs):

RQ1. Specialism: How do the climate niche site professionals define their “distinct” task or role?

RQ2. Content: What are the main types of content they produce?

RQ3. Roles: What are the main role perceptions that the journalists embrace?

Materials and Methods

Materials

The contemporary global landscape of online providers of climate information is vast, diverse and continuously evolving. We know of only a few attempts to map this and provide a detailed list and taxonomy of the climate sites. One of the most recent was carried out by the Milken Institute for Public Health, which gathered a list⁷ (dated January 2020) of 54 climate information sites. To complement these mapping initiatives, we conducted a Google search (in May 2020) using the search word combination “climate change—news—science—policy”, surveying the first 150 hits. Broadly, this field of online climate information is hosted by four main types of institutions, namely scholarly/academic institutions, national/international government agencies, political agencies such as think tanks and NGOs, and mainstream news organizations, blog sites and climate niche sites.

In order to examine this “niche” from the perspective of the journalism, we identified sites from this large field and range of sites which (a) not only recognize climate communication as (one of their) their primary mission(s) but (b) define journalism as their main product. By journalism, we mean “a professional practice that gathers, evaluates, selects, and presents news and information, generates original content guided by journalistic criteria, and/or following editorial principles and distributes them via technical media to a (potentially) wide range of general and specialist audiences” (Schäfer and Painter 2021, 2).

Beyond the criteria (a) and (b) above, we also focused on those sites which seemed to be operating successfully but with different priorities within this intersection of science, politics and traditional journalism. We aimed for a range of geographies and countries, resource and finance availability, types of employee, sub-topic specialization, and relationships with climate science and mainstream journalism. So we sought an equal representation of the US and UK fields and of the Global South (particularly China and India), and a range of sites with different amount of resources to call on. Also of interest to us was ensuring a presence in our sample of sites of a variety of discrete skill sets, including those with a journalistic, science, or data presentation background. Given the size and complexity of the field, we chose illustrative, “strategic” examples to capture the variety in professional conceptions and topical focuses among climate niche sites, rather than an exact representation of a clearly defined population. In essence, the chosen sites represent different, but journalistically motivated, ways of entering the science-politics-journalism space, and operating within it.

The full details of the fourteen sites eventually chosen can be found in Table A in the Supplementary Material, which clearly shows their key characteristics and differences:

UK: Carbon Brief, Climate Home News (CHN), DeSmog UK, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF)

USA: Climate Central, Climate Wire, Grist, Inside Climate News (ICN), Yale Climate Communications (YCC)

Other regions⁸: China Dialogue, Energi Og Klima (EOK), Klimareporter, the Third Pole.

Methods

We were interested in the expertise and experience of key actors in these platforms. For this purpose, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were carried out by three researchers with senior representatives of each of the sites. A full list of the interviewees can be found in Table B in the Supplementary Material. The interviews were fully transcribed and uploaded to Atlas.ti to enable a systematic coding of the respondents’ views and reflections according to a list of primary thematic codes, and then different code words and search terms were applied to collect the responses of relevance to the three Research Questions. (See Supplementary Material).

To address RQ3, we structured interview questions with a rough typology of roles identified in Fahy and Nisbet 2011, 780. We chose the following six categories:

• Advocates/policy shapers

• Agenda-setters

• Watchdogs/accountability

• Curators of science information

• Conveners of experts and interested parties

• Civic educators

We deliberately did not describe in detail these categories to the interviewees to allow their own interpretation, unless they asked for more details. However, although advocacy journalism has been defined as that which “presents news from a distinct point of view, does not separate facts from values, and is motivated often by a political or social agenda” (Fahy 2017, 856), we are aware that the term is interpreted differently by practicing journalists, as evidenced by the results presented in the Differences in Role Perceptions section.

Results

Specialism

Many of the interviewees gave a strong indication of how highly they rated the importance of being distinct. However, there were several dimensions to how they described their specialization. We focused on two lenses through which to assess their specialism, namely how they identified their distinctive role (often in terms of content) compared to other niche sites, and how they differentiated their relationship to science, policy networks, and mainstream journalism.

At its simplest level, some respondents saw their specific niche, or added value, as focusing on climate change in general (often as contrasted to general news), where they were providing information about the world through the lens of climate change. An example of this would be Climate Wire, whose editor, Evan Lehmann, described the site as being different “insofar that everything we write about is climate change”. In a similar fashion, Klima Reporter’s Susanne Schwarz said her site “covers everything about climate as well as possible”. Vernon Loeb, the executive editor of ICN, described his site in the following way:

We do one thing. We do it really well. We care about one thing. We’re not trying to be all things. We don’t cover sports. We don’t cover local crime and all the other stuff that newspapers have to cover. One thing and we cover it comprehensively and I think that’s what people like that about us. […] We’re one of the biggest environment newsrooms in the country. We have a niche. We have a topic that everybody cares about that’s super important and that it’s so important foundations and readers will support us so we have a financial model that work.

However, we can also differentiate between the sites we included by situating them in the broader context of climate communication. Judging from the interviews, a more specific identity inside the field of climate communication was shaped by their relationship (and the added value and authority they claimed) in three spheres, namely (a) “scientific expertise”, (b) “political or other type of expertise” and (c) “extension of mainstream journalism”.

Sites that Situate Themselves or Define Themselves Mainly by Claiming Scientific Expertise

For example, Climate Wire’s Evan Lehmann described science as their “touchstone”, and that all their stories were rooted in the findings of the hard science of climate change. John Upton from Climate Central described his website as being “very, very science-focused” and all of their journalism as being “underpinned by data, scientific data, and a lot of it comes internally”. YCC’s Sarah Peach says one of their main differentiators lies in the research on climate science (and public opinion) that they have access to through colleagues at Yale University.

Carbon Brief, while clearly giving priority to the journalistic qualities of their final articles, showed almost the same amount of peer-reviewed rigor as scientific journals. As Leo Hickman expressed it,

I’d go back to the explainer thing. We go deeper than anyone else probably can afford to go timewise or even budget-wise and we’re not a news publication. So if we would spend weeks, sometimes months, researching or writing something, we wanted that article to have a very long tail so it would be searchable and usable for years. […]A crucial bit of Carbon Brief is to make sure that what we do is effectively as bulletproof as we can. It’s a whole series of internal things that we go through like we triple-edit our pieces. I will do the last edit but, any piece we publish will always be at least seen by someone else, often by our policy editor or our science editor.

Sites that Rely More on Political Expertise or Closeness to Political/Policy Networks in Specific Policy Areas or Specific Geographic Locations

ECIU, for example, specializes in energy policy, and having influence in that area with members of the UK parliament politicians of all colors, the media and the “general public”. In a similar fashion, EOK in Norway specializes in all aspects of the energy transition, and as Anders Bjartnes explains:

If you are having good relations with some of the important politicians in different parties, some of the experts in academia, some of the editors in mainstream media, and some important influential persons from the trade unions and business associations, then you can help to facilitate the agenda for the discussion that's going on in these circles.

Some sites have a wider overarching social or political agenda. Grist describes itself as specializing in climate but combines this with a broader mission of social justice and cultural politics. It says it is “the only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice”.⁹ Likewise, Mat Hope from Desmog UK said the vision underpinning its work is to see “the environment as a political and social issue”. The site has expertise in a particular theme (climate denialism and lobbying), but its area of operation is very much political in exposing the financial interests behind those lobbying to prevent climate action.

Three of the sites we examined clearly had expertise in specific geographic locations, but with an ambition to get voices from these locations heard in the public sphere. For example, for China Dialogue, “the core proposition particularly with climate coverage was always that we would publish Chinese voices on climate change into the world, into the wider sort of Anglosphere as it were. And bring global voices on global environmental issues into China.” The Third Pole is a multilingual platform dedicated to promoting information and discussion about the Himalayan watershed, but the transboundary nature of their work with policy makers, NGOs, academics/think tanks and the public is essential to their identity.

Sites That See Themselves More as an Extension of Mainstream Journalism

Several of the interviewees pointed to the multiplicity of ways their sites are complementing the climate coverage of mainstream media. These range from filling gaps in the coverage, providing information to help mainstream journalists, setting agendas for mainstream media, or offering different perspectives. Their distinctiveness often is underpinned by an appreciation of where they think they have a comparative advantage often through the particular expertise of their staff. In two cases (ECIU and YCC), the representatives of the sites felt they were in some sense correcting the content put out by the mainstream media. YCC spoke of its focus on climate solutions instead of the “doom and gloom” of mainstream journalism. ECIU’s Richard Black said part of its role was to correct misinformation in parts of the mainstream media, particularly in the area of renewables and climate science.

However, in three cases, the sites saw themselves primarily as adding something to what mainstream media were offering. For example, Megan Derby from Climate Home News explained that:

Mainstream media or legacy media have a more pulled back perspective. When they write stories it’s going to be more, broad brush context. But they need sources. They need to find those sources from somewhere and specialist media (like us) is generally one step ahead. I think they need us to some extent. I think we can we still offer something to specialist readers that just is a bit more fine-grained and goes beyond what the legacy media can offer. […] But I think as specialists we can really set the news agenda and set the tone for mainstream reporting because when they come into some familiar environment they’re looking for what sources are out there and they come across Climate Home. So I think we can be quite influential in the broader media ecosystem in that way.

ICN’s distinct contribution and identity is its emphasis on investigative reporting, which mainstream media often do not have the resources and time to carry out. For Susanne Schwarz from Klimareporter, her site explains the complexities of climate science and policy in a way that also serves journalists: “People who have some sort of special interest in climate change can find information at Klimareporter that mainstream media don’t provide”.

Both Climate Central and Climate Wire straddle this category and the scientific expertise category. Climate Central provides information and climate data for local media, which they normally cannot access. Climate Wire is also very science-based but it adds to the output of mainstream media by finding new stories not covered by them, and “telling them in compelling ways”.

TRF also straddles the previous category (in terms of its emphasis on a broad geographic location) and this category. Its specialism has been situated in covering climate change impacts in developing countries for the last 20 years, which fitted with the original humanitarian mission of the Foundation, but also as supplying information not often covered by mainstream media due to their limited resources. They see their distinct role as “providing news that others are not providing, that gives people a real window into places, and a window that’s told not through western eyes but through the eyes of the people that are there.”

So in summary, the editors see their distinctive roles often as a combination of a specialization in a single topic, and as a conscious or unconscious placement in relation to the three spheres mentioned above. Their distance from these spheres varies, but none of the sites (and their operational logics) can be reduced to one or another aspect of this intersection.

Differences in Content

The specialism of these sites is closely related to their emphasis on particular aspects of the climate change “story”, which incorporates a wide variety of themes including the causes, the impacts in various societal fields, the international and domestic politics behind it, as well as ways of mitigating or adapting to it. Indeed, the interviewees often spoke of having discrete strengths based on their content offer. To illustrate this, column 2 of Table 1 shows the topic specializations of the fourteen sites as highlighted by the interviewees. We should stress that the different categorizations are not completely discrete, as some of them overlap with each other, and are by no means exhaustive of the topics the sites cover. But they are sufficiently robust to give insights into the differences between the sites, and the clear differences to mainstream climate coverage (which by its nature is more general and news-driven).

Table 1. Website content by site.

	Topic specialization or emphasis	Geographical focus	Daily news	Analysis	Explainers	Special reports	Opinion
Carbon Brief	Climate Science	UK, EU, China, World		✓	✓	✓
Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU)	Energy policy	UK		✓	✓	✓	✓
Desmog UK	Denialism, lobbying	UK, USA, EU		✓	✓	✓	✓
Climate Home	International politics, diplomacy	International	✓	✓		✓	✓
Thomson Reuters Foundation	Adaptation, impacts in developing world	International		✓	✓	✓	✓
Grist	Climate action, social justice	USA		✓	✓	✓
Inside Cclimate News	Environmental News	USA	✓	✓	✓	✓
Climate Wire	Solutions, news	USA, international	✓	✓		✓
Yale Climate Connections	Adaptation, Solutions	USA		✓	✓	✓	✓
Climate Central	Localising climate	USA		✓	✓	✓
Third Pole	Impacts on developing countries	Asia		✓	✓	✓	✓
Energi og klima	Solutions; politics; energy	Norway, EU, international		✓	✓	✓	✓
China Dialogue	Global policy, geopolitics, China	China, international		✓	✓	✓	✓
Klimareporter	International politics	Germany, international		✓	✓	✓	✓

For example, CHN’s particular focus is on the international politics of climate change, including the negotiations and diplomacy at UNFCCC meetings; ECIU on providing “informed debate” about energy and climate change; Climate Central on local climate impact stories; TRF on the climate change impacts on developing countries; Climate Wire, YCC and EOK on solutions; and DeSmog UK, on climate science denial and lobbying organizations around it.

Column 3 in Table 1 shows the geographical emphasis of the different sites. The remaining columns (4–8) show that there is little variation between the sites in terms of the editorial formats they offer (particularly analysis, explainers/backgrounders and investigations/special reports). All the sites put a premium on news analysis, to different degrees, in some cases to differentiate themselves from mainstream media. All but two of the sites prominently parade “explainer” or “backgrounder” articles. Leo Hickman describes Carbon Brief’s mission to “explain the hell out of the latest science and the latest policy developments […] and build up an almost like a timeless library of explainer pieces about climate change”; Vernon Loeb from ICN says explanation is “a strong part of our identity. There’s a strong explanatory vein to what we’re doing”; Joydeep Gupta speaks of the Third Pole’s “mission to explain”; whereas Susanne Schwarz’s Klimareporter describes part of their function as “just explaining complicated matters in easy ways”.

In contrast, only three of the websites (CHN, ICN, Climate Wire) said they cover the daily (climate) news of the day, defined as a relatively rapid response to an ongoing or breaking news event. CHN’s Megan Darby described her site as being “more of a news service in terms of covering news quickly, where it was imperative often to find a new angle or context.” Some of the interviewees stressed that they deliberately did not cover breaking news, in part because that was the mainstream media’s job. For example, Leo Hickman from Carbon Brief said:

We’re actually quite often slow to the news. Almost intentionally. We’re almost a quarterback in American football. We almost sit in the pocket behind the offensive line. All the news publications rush in and will cover stuff and their story will be out that day and not readable within 3–4 h because they’re a news publication.

However, it is worth pointing out first, Carbon Brief does offer a daily news service in the sense that it aggregates news from other media sources and presents a selection of them, and second that a small number of sites (TRF, the Third Pole), while not assiduously following the news cycle, do offer a “news index” or “latest news” section on their front page, where news is probably more defined as an issue in the news.

All the sites do special reports, although some put more emphasis on “investigative reporting”, defined here as longer-format reports or stories which deliver revelations and clear developments beyond the reporting of events, are “off-diary”, and stem from often lengthy hours of research spent by the journalists themselves on a specific theme or event. ¹⁰ DeSmog UK’s series of reports on spinning/greenwashing/climate denial would fit into this category and indeed is part of their specialization.¹¹ Similarly, ICN has made its name for in-depth multi-dimensional reports, such as their investigation into the Kalamazoo river oil spill in Michigan, which won them a Pulitzer Prize in 2013.¹²

Column 8 in Table 1 shows differences between the sites as to their approaches towards opinion pieces or comments (often in the form of blogs or guest posts). Whereas most of the sites would champion the non-partisan nature of their reporting, some clearly eschew any type of opinion content, whereas others do not. Carbon Brief makes a virtue of “knocking out any sense of opinion piece that < guest writers > may have tried to slip into < their guest posts>”, and also does not offer a platform for opinion or comment pieces. In this, it differs from the other four UK-based sites. In contrast, only YCC of the four US-based sites offers comment pieces. This approach is partly explained by the role perceptions of many of the sites as not doing advocacy, which will be explored in the Differences in Role Perceptions section.

Not included in the Table are the dominant formats used to provide climate content, nor a description of how they use social media (which will be covered in a separate paper). Most of the sites follow a model of multiple articles on the website, newsletters, and podcasts. YCC stands out for its menu of short radio pieces, and Carbon Brief for its data-driven illustrations. Many of them have experimented with video reports, photo montages, email alerts, webinars or other formats but the core menu remains website-based articles and newsletters.

Differences in Role Perceptions

Table 2 shows a simplified summary of the responses from the interviewees to the question of whether they saw themselves as carrying out one or more of the six roles outlined in the Methods section. Many interpreted the categories slightly differently, and some distinguished between whether they followed those roles in a strong or weaker sense. Ten or more of the sites saw themselves as civic educators, conveners of interested parties, agenda-setters and watchdogs. Eight described themselves as curators of science information and seven as advocates or policy shapers.

Table 2. Role perceptions.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
	Advocates/policy shapers	Agenda setters	Watchdogs/accountability	Curators of science information	Conveners of experts	Civic educators
Carbon Brief		n/a	✓(weak)	✓	✓	✓
ECIU	✓(weak)	✓	✓(weak)		✓
Desmog UK	✓(weak)	✓	✓			✓
Climate Home	✓(weak)	✓	✓		✓(weak)
TRF	✓(weak)	✓			✓	✓
Grist		✓	✓	✓
ICN		n/a	✓	n/a	✓	✓
Climate Wire		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
YCC		✓(weak)		✓	✓	✓
Climate Central		✓(weak)		✓	✓	✓(weak)
Third Pole	✓(weak)	✓	✓	✓	✓
Energi och klima	✓(weak)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
China Dialogue		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Klimareporter	✓(weak)	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

Some of the answers are more straightforward to interpret than others. Many of the websites organize conference, meetings, and webinars bringing together different sorts of expertise, hence the large number of answers saying they are conveners of experts and interested parties (column 6). In a similar fashion, most see themselves as civic educators (column 7), as they are communicating climate information to make it understandable to wider publics. ICN spoke of having the goal “to break the science down to understandable prose”, and trying to “edit jargon and super science-y stuff out of stories or at least to break it down and explain it to people so anybody can get it”. TRF described themselves as civic educators in the sense of providing information and news to readers that they would not normally get.

Carbon Brief, YCC and Climate Central unsurprisingly described themselves as curators of science information (column 5), given their close relationship to science described in 3.1 above. But several other sites, particularly in the United States, also said they played this role.

Many of the sites also saw themselves as playing a watchdog or accountability role (column 4). ICN described themselves as “having a very strong accountability role. […] We’re explaining the crisis to people but I think probably accountability most informs the way we think about what we’re doing.” Desmog UK saw themselves as being watchdogs in the sense of “when a politician has had a meeting with a particular person, we’ll probably write a story saying, just so you know, the Minister for Energy just met with someone from Australia’s largest mining company. […] We try to hold these people to account”. Likewise, CHN was one of several media outlets to investigate UK involvement in a large LNG project in Mozambique, and whether it was compatible with climate goals.

By holding governments to account in that way, you create an environment where they think more deeply about the climate impact of their decisions. We try to hold powerful actors to account in this way. If you are not thinking about climate when you are making these decisions, then why not?.

Most of the sites saw themselves as agenda setters (column 3), but this usually meant not a narrow sense of drawing attention to one particular aspect of climate science or policy for policy makers, but rather a broader dimension of covering some aspect of climate change and informing people so that they think about it more. For example, YCC described their agenda-setter role in this way:

We’re not telling them you need to go and tell your congressman to support a carbon tax. But we are deliberately getting the climate change to appear on the radio and people’s news feeds as often as we can, just so that they’re thinking about climate change and about potential solutions.

The answers to the question on whether they saw themselves as doing advocacy or being policy shapers (column 2) provided many nuances, depending mainly on what the interviewees understood by the terms. It was significant that only half of the fourteen sites described themselves as advocates or policy shapers, of which four were based in the United Kingdom. However, all of the seven said they played these roles in a weak sense, usually as policy shapers. It was particularly notable that all five sites in the USA distanced themselves from any advocacy role. Again, the terminology is important here, as investigative journalism, as practised by ICN for example, clearly has a weak advocacy role in putting pressure on legislators or polluting companies by shining a light on environmentally damaging activities.

Many of them were categorical that they were not campaigners or activists. Often the traditional distinction was cited between the objective, balanced, opinion-free, non-partisan values of traditional journalism, and the stance-based values of campaigning or activism. Several sites, including TRF, spoke of the distinction between advocacy and presenting information; “We’re not advocates. What we’re trying to do is to, present information, like journalists anywhere, so people are well-informed to make choices.” Likewise, ICN said that

because of our name we sometimes are mistaken for being climate activists and we’re very clear that we are not activists. We are journalists and that we are non-partisan, non-opinion reporting journalists. We practise reported journalism that seeks to be full, fair and accurate.

Klimareporter was also keen to distance itself from any activism implied in their name.

CHN was less convinced by the traditional value of balance, but still distinguished itself from activism:

I think the old idea of balance in journalism is outdated and tends to favor the status quo and neutrality. The old ideal that journalists are neutral transcribers of what people in power say—I wouldn’t subscribe to that. But I wouldn’t describe us as activists in pursuing particular outcomes.

TRF described itself as knowing activists well but being distinct to them, while Third Pole was also keen to distinguish itself from activism. However, they did not rule out giving space on their site to activists, amongst other voices:

We do not do advocacy. We are very, very careful not to do it. One of the first things we tell all our journalists is that look, anybody who wants to write for us, who calls himself or herself a journalist, has to be a journalist and not an activist. When an activist wants to write for us, if we find it newsworthy, we publish it, and very clearly identify that author as an activist. Similarly with policymakers or scientists. But when a journalist is writing for us, we are very clear that we do not want advocacy, we want news. We want specialized news, but we want news.

In a similar fashion, YCC and China Dialogue include the voices of activists on their pages to show a wide variety of perspectives, on solutions and other issues. As Sam Geall explains it:

At China Dialogue we try to create a bridge for communication and establish a bedrock of accurate information to facilitate better discussions and more sustainable outcomes, across boundaries (of language, culture, geography). That means, in my opinion, we've drawn a line that falls short of outright campaigning and advocacy, but allows a greater diversity of views (including those of advocates and campaigners) to be heard.

Although all of the sites were keen to show their distance from campaigning or activism, and in this way could be distinguished from for example, the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground Campaign, there was often a sense in which they were “weak” advocates. This could take the form of stressing the need for (non-specific) action to tackle climate change, or providing information (particularly on solutions) which could help to mitigate the impacts from climate change. Grist (one of whose goals is “to show that the time for action is now”) or YCC (whose slogan is “Listen. Watch. Read. Act!”) would fall into the first category. ICN also talks of “part of the story going forward is convincing people of the urgency of climate change”. In the second category, TRF speaks of their having

an awareness of the growing threat of climate change, and that drives our desire to cover this really well and to be spending our time doing the things that are most effective and valuable to contribute to the greater understanding about the risks related to climate change.

“Shaping policy” could also be seen as a form of weak advocacy, and here we found more nuances in how the interviewees responded. Some, like Carbon Brief, were categorical that at all times they followed “a policy-neutral tone”, whilst others wanted to be seen as policy relevant, or having a policy impact in broad terms, without having a specific policy goal (e.g., Klimareporter). In the UK context, this meant not advocating for a particular policy position or outcome for political parties or other actors (ECIU, DeSmog UK), but providing policy-relevant information or evidence. ECIU described themselves as “advocates for the use of evidence. I wouldn’t say that we’re policy shapers but I would say that we are debate shapers, conversation shapers.” Others stressed that by shining a light on an underreported area of climate change, this provided an impetus to address a particular issue for policy makers.

Many spoke of giving plenty of space to the coverage of solutions, without advocating any particular one. China Dialogue is representative of this approach: “we clearly think that climate change is clear and is urgent and something that we need to be discussing globally and find constructive solutions to. But we don’t need to have a line on issues.”

In summary, none of these sites saw themselves as advocates in the sense of Fahy’s definition mentioned above (Fahy 2017) of presenting news from a distinct point of view, not separating facts from values, and being motivated often by a political or social agenda. This was seen as equivalent to campaigning or activism. However, many of them did articulate a weak version of following an agenda (taking action on climate change or providing information to make it more likely), and publishing policy-relevant information for policy makers (and others). This could be expressed as their having a “strategic” agenda about the overall importance of the climate change topic, compared to a “tactical” agenda of covering or framing an aspect of climate change in a time-specific or immediate political context.

Discussion and Conclusions

There are some limitations to our findings. First, we have not explored in this paper the extent to which the business models of the sites affect the content, specialization and professional role models. Nor have we examined the detailed impacts of their journalism on audiences and wider society (such as stopping an unwelcome practice or helping to embark on a new one, or the impact on readers, politicians or mainstream journalism). Both topics are the subject of separate papers.

However, in answer to our three research questions outlined in the Introduction section, we find clear and important variations between the sites in how they view these three aspects. The interviewees articulate multiple facets to their distinctiveness, broadly divided into an emphasis on sites that situate themselves or define themselves by claiming some kind of scientific expertise, those that rely more on political or policy expertise (often with a geographical specialization), and those that see themselves primarily as complementing the work of mainstream journalism. Closely linked to this is a multiplicity of specialized content, broadly divided into certain, often discrete, topics.

This level of diversity in climate information can be seen as a positive development as it helps to provide different types of information to different types of audiences with different needs, often filling the gaps and complementing the coverage of mainstream media. The information provided by these sites rarely diverges from the main tenets of mainstream climate science, and so unlike the role of right-leaning media giving space to different types of skeptic voices, it is hard to argue that they contribute to public uncertainty about the seriousness of climate risks, the causes of climate change, or the need to take urgent action to mitigate the worst effects. They also provide a counter-force against climate disinformation campaigns in that they offer easily digestible accurate information and in some cases (ECIU) challenge misleading information publicly.

The senior representatives of the sites see many of their journalistic roles (such as agenda-setters, watchdogs, and civic educators) as similar, but differ noticeably in how far they see themselves as curators of science information and how they perceive their roles as advocates or policy shapers, depending on how this is defined.

So what do our results tell us about possible changing practices in this (relatively) new form of climate journalism? First, at the empirical level, this study points to the importance of studying “the niche” as an intersection of many factors, and in this case, topic specialization within a context of a multi-faceted, transnational, urgent issue; its relationship to the actors within the policy and science fields; and the wider drivers of how the debates around the topic are evolving at the intersection of media, politics and science.

Secondly, our dominant impression is that traditional, professional journalistic values and norms still predominate. On the basis of the self-declared evidence from senior representatives of the climate niche sites in our sample, their journalists may follow a weak version of agenda-setting in the sense of making climate prominent in the public’s mind, but they do not follow a more overt campaigning or advocacy mission, or follow different editorial values to mainstream journalists (except for a few at right-leaning media). There is certainly little evidence that despite the urgency of the climate question and the mobilization by youth sectors and other civilian movements around the world, these journalists are following a political advocacy model described by Waisbord (2009) as a form of “political mobilization that seeks to increase the power of people and groups and to make institutions more responsive to human needs” (Waisbord 2009, 371).

This may be a reflection in part of the fact that many senior editors and representatives of these sites have made the journey from mainstream media, already strongly imbued with traditional values of independence, objectivity and impartiality and continuing to be so (Strauss et al. 2021; Robbins and Wheatley 2021). At eight of our sites¹³ senior editors, managing editors or directors were former (senior) journalists at mainstream media. Or it may be also due to such values being an insurance or defensive strategy against attacks from different actors in what has become a highly politically contested area in some countries (particularly the USA, and to a certain extent in the United Kingdom).

However, we find evidence that although the vocabulary of professional journalistic values remains intact, some of the practices, norms and priorities associated with them have shifted. So for example, professional objectivity at these sites is not seen as much in terms of balance, but more in terms of being authoritative (and effective mediators) about climate science, and in some cases being highly specialized in knowledge of the complexity of the science and the consequent, legitimate borrowing of scientific authority.

At the more theoretical level, our analysis suggests the importance of scrutinizing and fleshing out the political and institutional contexts in which journalism operates as an “emerging hybrid institution” (Chadwick 2012; Reese 2021). First, our exploratory analysis highlights the importance of a more nuanced analysis of journalistic authority. We see how by elaborating, explaining and diversifying a specific journalistic space (at the intersection of climate science, politics and mainstream journalism) these sites provide a discrete value. Instead of amplifying the general, abstract uncertainty of science, they highlight the complexity of climate knowledge as it is articulated in different disciplinary and political contexts. By doing so, these sites cultivate advanced practices of relational journalistic authority (Carlson 2017), simultaneously stressing both the urgency and complexity of the climate knowledge. In this sense, they also offer another example of the importance of analyzing the “co-productive” relations (e.g., Lück, Wozniak, and Wessler 2016) that underlie climate journalism.

Second, more work needs to be done on understanding how these news forms of journalism situate themselves in relation to political decision making. Previous scholarship has pointed to the importance of rooting journalism practice in particular political contexts and cultures (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Mellado, Hellmueller, and Donshbach 2017; Hanitzsch et al. 2019). Our findings would offer some support to such an approach as the US-based sites clearly espouse the strongest claims to professional objectivity, whereas other sites based outside the USA show more willingness to see themselves as “policy shapers”. Norway shows signs of its more corporatist legacy in the priority given by EOK to bridging the gap between politicians, the media and economic interest groups around policy issues. But this is not peculiar to Norway, as ECIU in the United Kingdom and the Third Pole in the Himalayan region see themselves offering a similar role following more cooperative or communicative practices with established policy actors.

This diversity is reminiscent of Sheila Jasanoff’s (2011) notion of “civic epistemologies”—the inherited practices of translating scientific evidence into public, policy shaping knowledge. Our findings here suggest that the repertoires of “niche” (climate) journalism and the functions they might serve in the interaction of politics and science deserve further inquiry. A particularly interesting dimension in this respect is the global and transnational reach of many of the sites studied here. We see evidence of the transnational nature of the climate challenge not defined by specific national contexts but transcending boundaries as a response to the global nature of the challenge (TRF, China Dialogue, Third Pole).

Thirdly, in relationship to mainstream journalism, it is worth remembering that many of the sites were set up in a relatively narrow period from 2006-2014. This was a time when mainstream media coverage of climate change was suffering cuts to specialist reporters and funding was available from non-profits to finance the gap; climate coverage was still often bedeviled by the strong presence of different forms of climate denialism (Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; Painter and Gavin 2016); and climate scientists were not as prominent voices in the media compared to politicians (Anderson 2017).

By 2020, at the time of the interviews, it was already apparent this situation was changing as major media companies, and particularly left-leaning or liberal outlets, had increased their volume and topic range of climate change stories (including the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC, and Sky News) or maintained it (Guardian, Financial Times) (Schäfer and Painter 2021), often providing readers with a wide variety of climate themes also covered by niche sites. As the same time outright climate denialism was either declining in the media and elsewhere (McAllister 2021) or changing to climate obstructionism or discourses of delay (Lamb et al. 2020); and climate science voices were becoming more prominent on mainstream and social media (e.g., Painter et al. 2021).

At first sight, this changing context for climate niche sites may make it more difficult for them to stand out and be distinctive as a necessary condition for survival in an increasingly crowded market. However, given the profound, systemic and long range of the future climate challenges—and the complexity of the transition ahead—the need for specialist climate journalism may actually strengthen the demand for such sites. For example, sites such as Carbon Brief and Climate Central where science expertise and practice becomes incorporated and adapted into the journalistic work should be able to build on this distinctiveness and continue to serve as a bridge between mainstream journalism and science.

In conclusion, we offer new empirical evidence about a particular variety of niche journalism, and how journalists negotiate their expertise and relationship to other key actors. At the same time, we have highlighted the importance of understanding the “niche” journalism as something rooted not only in targeted audiences but in a broader set of knowledge and power relationships. Climate “niche” journalism offers here a powerful example of such relationships. Further research should monitor and clarify the ways climate niche sites evolve at this intersection of the media, science and policy worlds, and how their professional roles may change as they come under more pressure to abandon neutrality and become advocates for urgent climate action, and as the traditional divisions of labor between scientists and journalists become more blurred as they share new role models, norms and practices (Brüggemann, Lörcher, and Walter 2020).

Acknowledgements

This project was led by Professor Risto Kunelius of the University of Helsinki. All respondents were informed about the aims of the interview and the research and they agreed to be interviewed. The Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK does not require an ethical review for this type of research participant, or their written consent before publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by a grant from The Helsingin Sanomat Foundation (Project: Expertise, activism and policy. Mapping the challenges of transnational climate journalism) and supported by an Academy of Finland grant (Project: ECANET, SA 345905).

Notes

1 See for example the Covering Climate Now initiative (www.coveringclimatenow.org); https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2022/02/10/post-announces-newsroom-expansion-adding-more-than-70-positions-2022/; https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2022/ap-announces-sweeping-climate-journalism-initiative

2 The source for all monthly visit statistics is www.similarweb.com, accessed in February 2022.

3 Carbon Brief received eight million visits just for one graphic it published in January 2020, partly because it was re-tweeted by the Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg. See https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1214150289378435072

4 See for example Climate Wire’s list of government officials, corporations, and think tanks amongst others. https://www.eenews.net/customer-stories/

5 See https://insideclimatenews.org/impact/

6 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/keep-it-in-the-ground

7 https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/sources-for-climate-news/

8 We intended to include a fifth representative of this sub-group from Finland but chose not to include it due to its primary purpose not being journalism.

9 https://grist.org/about/

10 https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/introduction-to-journalism/0/steps/1650

11 See, for example, https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/06/07/brexit-climate-denier-map

12 https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15042013/insideclimate-news-team-wins-pulitzer-prize-national-reporting/

13 Senior editors, managing editors or directors are often former (senior) journalists at mainstream media, as is the case with Carbon Brief, China Dialogue, Climate Wire, ECIU, EOK, ICN, Third Pole, and TRF.