SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Closer Look at the Quantity of Climate Coverage in 2011
from the Columbia Journalism Review
Just how scarce was climate-change coverage in 2011? It's hard to get a fix on the details,
but the broad conclusion that it was even scarcer than in the year before seems to hold up.
Last week, I wrote a post about an analysis by The Daily Climate--a website that produces and
tracks news about climate change--which found that the number of articles, blog posts,
editorials, and op-eds "declined roughly 20 percent from 2010's levels and nearly 42 percent from
2009's peak," based on a review of its own archives of aggregated climate stories.
The conclusion about the downward trend "felt right" to journalists that sent me e-mails
responding to the piece. But they were miffed at my decision to report The Daily Climate's
rankings of specific outlets' year-to-year productivity. I did point out--by way of update that
should've been included from the outset--that The Daily Climate's analysis was based on a review
of its archives, which are "meant to provide broad sampling of the day's coverage, not a
comprehensive list," according to its editor, Douglas Fischer. Therefore, the rankings did not
reflect the various outlets' actual productivity.
Read more...
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