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Newspaper Front Page Stories, October 2022 With Links To The Climate Crisis

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In light of COP27 happening this week, this photo above is striking and shows the newspaper front page stories in October 2022 with links to climate change and climate risks, from the Media and Climate Observatory (MECCO) Monthly Summaries. The work of MECCO is to monitor media coverage of themes associated with climate change and global warming, as there are no comparable monitoring services for news coverage of climate change or global warming.

MECCO reports that October media coverage of climate change or global warming in newspapers around the globe dipped five percent from September 2022 and 37 percent from September 2021 levels. MECCO’s analysis also shows that coverage in international wire services decreased 15 percent, as radio coverage rose 21 percent from September 2022. Compared to the previous month, coverage decreased in the European Union (EU) (-4%), Asia (-6%), Oceania (-6%), the Middle East (-7%) and North America (-11%).

What is apparent from this data, is that when it comes to news about this topic, media outlets often struggle to gain audience attention. The climate crisis story can seem intractable, depressing, and often difficult to understand. It is also frequently politicised, with audiences polarised on the topic.

However, the following data from MECCO is insightful, showing coverage was up from the previous month in Africa (+14%), and Latin America (+19%), revealing that interest in climate change news is highest in these regions, and this is probably because the countries here have witnessed extreme weather events linked to the climate crisis. Where Chile continues to suffer from severe drought, which has made climate change ‘easy to see’, while this year every part of the African continent was affected by extreme weather events, ranging from wildfires in Algeria to catastrophic flooding in South Africa. It may be that audiences are more interested in news about the topic when they are not so polarised and can clearly see the negative effects of extreme weather where they live.

This data clearly shows that while the climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges for humanity right now, it is not always front-page news. Audiences appear to be more interested in and pay more attention to climate change news in places where the negative effects are felt more acutely. But it is too late if audiences only pay attention once disasters have already struck!

The challenge is how newsrooms continue to cover the issue in a way that draws attention to the causes and decisions that lead to disasters, not just the disasters themselves.

Are there other ways journalists can take to make climate change stories feel more relevant? Perhaps environmental documentaries are the way forward, which have wide appeal and provide clear and engaging stories. Afterall, we are the ‘age of the visual’, with video becoming increasing popular on social media. These visual narratives help audiences connect with what is a very large and sometimes abstract story – while not necessarily being ‘political’. A good example of this is the BBC’s very successful Blue Planet series with Sir David Attenborough and according to the Sunday Times, so many Chinese viewers downloaded Blue Planet II “that it temporarily slowed down the country’s internet”.

As a public relations professional, who knows only too well about the power of storytelling, I believe it all comes down to this…there is always room for better storytelling about the climate crisis.

 

What Will Mainstream Media Look Like Post The Pandemic

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When we all emerge from this pandemic, it will be a very different media landscape. We have seen that movies and television shows have delayed productions around the world and many of our much loved media titles, might not exist, as they struggle for survival.

Though television can be consumed while we are in lockdown, the creation of it still involves bringing people together on set. Widespread efforts to curb COVID-19 has triggered unprecedented change in the TV business. Where productions have stalled, writers’ rooms have moved to teleconferencing and radio presenters have guests either zooming or phoning in.

Many alternative weeklies have stopped printing and laid off employees, because of sharp advertising declines, as many businesses have stopped operating or sadly gone bust.

Journalists, photographers and advertising staff at print titles have lost their jobs and fear they will fear that they will not be re-employed when the crisis is over as sales and advertising revenues are not expected to return to pre-virus levels. Long-term, this crisis could have a devastating effect to the news industry’s bottom line.

Though there have been faint glimmers of light, where I have read how online news platforms have seen a spike in web traffic and subscriptions, as the pandemic has attracted record-breaking audiences for online news sources. Traffic to The Guardian’s website has increased more than 50 percent exceeding all previous records, and there had been a substantial surge in the number of readers taking out digital subscriptions or signing up to make regular contributions to support its journalism.

However, it’s worth noting that media outlets like The Guardian have long struggled to earn substantial revenue from digital advertising.

Yet, while we are now all addicted to the news, wanting accurate information. UK national print newspaper sales have fallen by as much as 30 percent since the start of the government-ordered coronavirus lockdown, according to industry sources, with journalists at many local newspapers placed on leave and warnings that hundreds of reporters could be left without jobs as the advertising market collapses.

On top of this, so many independent newsagents have closed, and supermarkets are expected to cut the numbers of copies of media titles they take because of reduced footfall. Free newspapers have also been hit by the collapse in commuters and ad revenue, with London’s Evening Standard adopting an improvised door-to-door delivery model, with a reduced circulation of just over 400,000 copies being posted through letterboxes in the center of the capital.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford told The Guardian that he predicts “huge declines in advertising revenues” owing to the looming recession that is likely to result in hundreds or even thousands of job losses in British journalism. He has predicted the economic effects of the pandemic could potentially remove 10 percent of all frontline journalistic jobs in the UK.

Nielsen voiced a concern of many in the industry, when he said a particular worry for British newspapers was that remaining print readers would lose the habit of reading a physical product during the lockdown.

No industry is being left untouched, many will have to innovate and change their business models to make a comeback and be part of the new world…a phoenix rising from the ashes.

 

Photo Credits: Sean McMenemy and Geralt

 

Finally – PR & Media Together Are Making The Right Headlines About Climate Crisis

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There’s not a day that goes by when we don’t see a climate, environmental or sustainable story making the headlines. I think it is safe to say that these topics are now high on the daily news agenda and it is about time. I have been actively involved working on raising the profile of the issues surrounding climate change, the impact of humans on the plant and sustainability for the last two decades…and during this time it has been a hard PR slog. As till now there has been a lack of apathy with the UK media.

I recall an environmental journalist working on one of the national broadsheets in the 90’s explaining to me his challenge of convincing his news editor to run a climate change story, that I was working on at the time. He said that unless it was directly affecting people here in the UK, it wasn’t a strong story for his editor – a story about climate change in Africa wasn’t going to interest his paper. Well fast-forward to 2019, where we are all experiencing the global butterfly effects of climate change or should I say what has since been upgraded to ‘climate crisis’ and what is happening in Africa, India, Singapore or any other part of the world is now our news.

Recently, The Guardian announced that it was updating its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crisis facing the world. Where instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned. “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

This news narrative is also being driven by the private sector, as corporations have started to wake up to the long-term implications for their businesses of global warming. Companies, such as Coca-Cola, Google, Apple and Tesla are vocal about climate change and their pursuit of sustainability; and this is also changing PR.

However, some argue that this kind of media reporting creates public fear and that a ‘war on the climate crisis’ is not a positive or a balanced media response.

I say that we have wasted the last twenty years trying to put this issue on the news agenda in order to raise public awareness about the state of the climate, an issue that affects us all. We are now at a tipping point and according to the eminent, Sir David Attenborough we only have ten years to make the planetary changes that we need to survive.

At last the PR and media industry are together making the right headlines about climate crisis. It’s a start. We need consistency across all media channels. The clock is ticking.