White edited ProPublica’s award-winning natural gas coverage and helped edit its article about a New Orleans hospital stranded by flooding after Hurricane Katrina, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her strategy brings SolveClimate, now InsideClimate, even farther from its early days as a content pressure cooker. With a full time staff of six, going deeper is, initially, going to mean publishing less.
“Every time I tell a reporter to take another day on a story, it’s going to cause us a slight problem,” White said in an interview. Without updating content frequently, a site can risk looking like vacant web property, losing traffic, and disappearing from search engines and Twitter feeds. “Then, you’re out of the loop.”
Yet White is confident that slowing down publication is the right direction for InsideClimate. “You can keep feeding the site, feeding the beast, and that’s okay,” she said, “but are you really giving your readers what is truly valuable to them?”
If quality over quantity is the goal, InsideClimate’s latest article, the only one since Labor Day, is an indication that it’s off to a good start. The 1,500-word piece is about the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. It forwent the hot angle about recent, star-studded arrests at protests outside the White House. Instead, it explained how advocates and opponents are “girding” for the final battle over the pipeline’s approval, examining various legal and political factors that might influence the outcome.
Sassoon feels like White’s changes will bring the site in the right and necessary direction. “Were not trying to be the most popular site and turn a dollar for investors and attract advertisers,” he said. “We’re trying to cover an issue well, and I think that’s an area that more foundations are stepping into.”
Hopefully, Sassoon is right, especially since he wants to double InsideClimate News’s staff over the next few years from six people to twelve. Investigative reporting is time consuming and costly by nature, but it beats derivative journalism any day (even if that’s not every day).
Yet another site wresting the news to support a particular political view and pre-determined solutions to as yet controversial science surrounding the question of the causes of perceived climate changes and the proposed solutions to or mitigation of those changes will not add much to the greater knowledge of its readers.
The artificial fight staged over the Keystone pipeline by so-called environmental groups, reminds one of the fictional organizations and lawyers in Michael Crichton's book, State of Fear.
Canada is going to develop the tar sands--period. The oil extracted is going to be sold and turned into the fuels that the world presently needs. A pipeline is going to be built to transport that oil to market. Nothing, short of an act of God, is going to change any of that. That is the story you should be covering, then maybe all that energy going into fighting the pipeline might be put to use doing something that will make a difference.
What to protest is a lesson I learned in my youth, fighting against the war in SE Asia. We, my friends and fellow travelers, wasted untold effort fighting the wrong fights with the wrong tactics. Today's 'greens' are making the same mistakes -- fighting the Keystone pipeline is one (of many).
#1 Posted by Kip Hansen, CJR on Fri 9 Sep 2011 at 04:18 PM
Kip
It is exactly because of the point of view on climate science that you and many other citizens hold that we have a long list of climate science links on our home page. The space is valuable real estate but we find it a good investment. It saves us from distraction, and allows you to educate yourself further, or to take up your objections with the National Science Foundation, the US Navy, the Department of Energy, the US Department of Agriculture, Oxford University and many other institutions. They have come to a clear understanding of man-made climate change and the need to respond to it. They are not espousing a political position, any more than we are, or any more than a cardiologist who thinks high cholesterol leads to heart disease, or an oncologist who understands smoking causes cancer.
The battle over the development of oil sands/tar sands and the permitting of the Keystone XL pipeline is one of the most important debates the nation is currently facing. We are bearing witness to the search for solutions that wisely balance both energy and environmental security. I think you may be misunderstanding not only science but democracy, too, if you think this important struggle is nothing more than third-rate fiction.
#2 Posted by David Sassoon, CJR on Sat 10 Sep 2011 at 04:06 PM
Right on, Kip. It's hard to believe more people don't realize the truth like you do. Fossil fuels are there for taking, and we need to just man up and take it all. Just like we should've pursued our war against Vietnam all the way, which is exactly what Nixon wanted. But Nixon made the mistake of listening to that pinko pansie scardie-pants Kissinger, and I'll be darned if we're not making the same mistake now, listening to those eco groups who'd rather sit around in tents with their green thumbs in their mouths instead of blowing up mountains for coal or punching holes in the ground, pouring down a little diesel and sucking back up some nice black oil. Who's scared of a little heat anyway? With enough coal & oil, we can run our air conditioners all we want. So again, Kip, more power to ya. Drill baby drill. Yeaaah.
#3 Posted by Steve, CJR on Tue 1 Nov 2011 at 03:13 AM