What to Make of The Guardian's New Climate Change Series?

In 2009, the New York Times launched "a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage," as the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) detailed. It seemed like a smart, innovative approach: Environmental issues have become increasingly complex, with crosscutting scientific, economic, and political angles. Climate change, seen by many as the story of the century, is the poster child for this complexity. So efforts "to push the story forward, to give it greater energy and focus," as a NYT memo described at the time, were largely applauded by journalism watchers. Alas, the experiment didn't pan out to the Times' liking; in 2013 the paper's management abandoned the environment "pod." The Times, of course, is still actively covering environmental stories, particularly climate change. Whether it is doing so with the kind of dedication and imperative it had declared in 2009 remains an open question. After the decision was made by the Times in 2013 to dismantle the special environment team, I agreed with Margaret Sullivan, the NYT Public editor, who wrote that "symbolically, this is bad news." It signaled that environmental coverage was deemed not important enough to warrant greater resources and sustained focus. Meanwhile, the Guardian, a leading newspaper in Britain, has in recent years signaled the opposite: It routinely features environmental stories on its digital homepage and has expansive online commentary and analysis from numerous green-oriented writers. (Compare that with the Times, which shuttered its lone environment blog months after dismantling the beat's special unit.) And now, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's much admired outgoing editor-in-chief, has announced that between now and this summer, when he steps down, the paper will prominently feature on its home page articles on the "climate threat." In reflecting on his 20-year tenure as the paper's editor, he wondered about missed opportunities: