Canada’s National Observer: Climate Journalism First
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April 3, 2024
To all of you for whom excellence in climate reporting matters, thanks for reading us each month. Lately, we decided to take a dive and explore the successful approaches Canadian media have built their environmental reporting on. It was obvious we needed to talk with people at Canada’s National Observer. Their stories are on our radar month after month. With limited means, they achieve to publish investigations, solutions stories, newsletters and news that make a difference.
You will also find our picks of the month right after the story.
Amélie
Canada’s National Observer: Finding your niche in climate reporting
By Olivia Integlia
The award-winning independent media outlet Canada’s National Observer (CNO) calls Barry Saxifrage its “resident chart geek and climate analyst.” He contributes to CNO’s Climate Solutions Reporting Project, investigating the biggest issues related to climate change with an emphasis on solutions to such problems, and using big data in a visual way. His stories, such as unearthing Canada’s methane leaks or forests tipping point, frequently make it to Carbon Paper’s top pick of the month, as many CNO stories do.
In her master of Journalism thesis, Willow Beck found out that almost 60% of the original content CNO published in 2022 was climate or environment-related, with 40% of that content being in a solution mode. That’s pretty distinctive in today’s media landscape.
That’s why we decided to reach out and ask why it is that CNO is such an inspiration when it comes to climate reporting.
A concerned citizen’s perspective
Surprising fact, Saxifrage says he has published hundreds of articles over the years, but yet, he does not call himself a journalist. “I don't have a journalism degree and I made a decision at the start of my climate work to never take any money for it,” he says. The former web-programmer have been retired from paid work for the last decade, which gave him the freedom to dedicate his time to climate reporting, he explains.
Screenshot of an overview of the articles by Barry Saxifrage in Canada’s National Observer.
Though he is not a reporter by training, Saxifrage says that the work he can do as a concerned citizen has its advantages. “I wanted to be free to write about whatever I thought needed to be covered. And I wanted the freedom to take as long as necessary to research and write about a topic,” he explains.
Taking the solutions approach
Editor-in-Chief of the CNO, Adrienne Tanner, highlights the importance of solutions journalism. “I think that if all you do is tell people the world is going to end, people will lose the world to do anything to try and change it because it'll just seem so hopeless,” she says.
She also adds, however, that climate journalists should scrutinize solutions and not shy away from reporting on the harms of climate change altogether. “You want to give people a mix. You want to be realistic about what's happening. You want to hold politicians to account for what's happening. But you also want to show people that there's a lot being done, and it isn't all bad news,” she says.
Tanner highlights that no solution is perfect and cautions journalists to be wary of greenwashing and the problems of solutions.
Luckily for Saxifrage, he says that his background in data science provides him with the right skill set to sift through misinformation commonly found in climate reporting. “I get a huge stream of press releases about climate. Nearly all of them are hype, greenwash or misleading.”
It takes Saxifrage about a month to write a story. He adds that he spends a lot of time researching, organizing data into spreadsheets, and waiting on governments and industries to make information accessible to the public.
While this process is time-consuming, he recognizes its value. “I rely on data to tell me what is really happening. And my readers need the data so they can decide for themselves. I don't want to be an ‘expert with opinions.’ I want to give readers the best data I can find and to clearly cite my sources so they can evaluate it,” he explains.
The challenge of funding climate reporting
Aside from misinformation, Adrienne Tanner says the biggest challenge for successful climate journalism is the lack of funding. “If you are a publication that challenges the business status quo, which climate reporting often does, you're certainly not going to get huge corporations throwing big gobs of money at you to carry on your reporting.”
The kind of reporting CNO favours might not attract advertisment money much, but readers and international recognition, certainly. Barry Saxifrage says it’s tough to know which stories have the most impact. Recently, a story cited by The New York Times got lots of online engagement, for example. But that’s not why he’s writing in the first place. “Helping society understand the climate threat and options available to act, that's the impact I care the most about. And there just aren't good metrics that I know of to measure that.”
Here are some more impressive climate and environmental reporters and contributors at CNO you need to be following:
(There are many more!)
In the news in February & March...
Black History Month and International Women’s Day Highlights:
Five years ago, Greta Thunberg inspired young Canadians to take action for the climate. What happens next?
Des militants climatiques québécois veulent retrouver l’élan de 2019
How the 2019 Fridays for Futures strikes inspired a wave of Canadian climate leaders
Who’s to blame? Fighting climate change:
Climate denial is taking new forms:
Wildfires: We haven’t heard the last of it…
The Climate and the Media in Canada newsletter is brought to you by Concordia Journalism assistant professor Amélie Daoust-Boisvert and her team. It’s made possible because of support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Questions, feedback? Reach out at cmrconcordia@gmail.com
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This month, the newsletter is signed by Olivia Integlia, Brianna Losinger-Ross and Mélanie Lussier, who coordinated the publication. Editor-in-chief and editor Amélie Daoust-Boisvert.