Wolfgang Blau hat vergangene Woche einen starken Vortrag über die Herausforderungen des Klimajournalismus gehalten. Um dieses Thema zu erforschen, hat er vor über einem Jahr seinen Job als Global Chief Operating Officer bei Condé Nast International gekündigt. Als Gastforscher am Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism hatte er die Zeit, viele Interviews mit Chefredakteuren, Klimajournalisten und anderen Menschen aus der Praxis zu führen.

Die Ergebnisse seiner Forschung fasst er nun in diesem Vortrag an der University of Oxford zusammen. Der Vortrag ist an die führenden Köpfe von Nachrichtenredaktionen in der ganzen Welt gerichtet. Wolfgang Blau ist in dieser Sphäre angesehen. Er war lange Chefredakteur bei Zeit Online und später in zentraler Position beim Guardian tätig.

Wer, wenn nicht er, sollte bei seinen Peers Gehör finden?

Der Vortrag von Wolfgang Blau ist in drei Teile gegliedert: Die operative Ebene, die kulturelle Ebene und die ethische Ebene. Jeder Teil enthält viele spannende Erkenntnisse und ich empfehle den Vortrag in Gänze zu schauen.

Hier ein paar Highlights

One climate journalist said to me: “I have the full support from my chief editor. I have even been given a budget increase. My problem is now the foreign editor who doesn’t give me access to our foreign bureaus when I need them because my stories — supposedly are never as urgent as other breaking news stories — and my other and bigger problem are the news desk editors who don’t give my story a prime time slot or never quite promote it on social media at the right time of day because they think it won’t perform well”.

In the most extreme of this behaviour, news organisations need to ask themselves whether this doesn’t amount to a form of editorial greenwashing itself: To produce climate journalism so you can say you are doing it and so you can point to the URL’s of each published story while never really throwing the full authority and distribution power of your news organisation’s brand behind it.

Most of [world’s climate scientists] had not signed up to become futurologists either. As they are being asked by the world’s governments to make the best possible predictions and recommendations in their IPCC reports, they have developed new methods and terminologies to adjust to this unpleasant degree of uncertainty.

Journalism — for lack of other societal actors to step in in time — should try to do the same.

Given the foreseeable vehement conflicts over climate policy in many countries, newsroom managers would do their staff and their journalism a favour if they now reviewed or updated their editorial codes of conduct to make sure there is at least a shared understanding in their newsroom, a shared language on what they think the typical indicators of editorial activism are and — more importantly — of what clearly isn’t activism in covering the accelerating climate crisis.

If you get the chance, ask a news desk editor about the abstract criteria by which she or he has chosen the current set of stories for today’s news update.

Many times you will only hear them paraphrase your own question back to you when they reply by saying their main criterion was ‘relevance’.

This is where an organisation such as CoveringClimateNow can make a significant difference as they try to build alliances of news organisations jointly covering key climate topics while taking many different stances on that same topic.

At Agence France Press, one of the world’s largest news agencies, their Global Chief Editor Sophie Huet is in the process of making sure that their bureaus around the world include possible climate aspects in every story as naturally as they would already include possible financial angles of a story