Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the "NIMBY syndrome" in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority-centered and reduces land-use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic-minded planners and irrational/self-interested opponents. After describing a struggle over locating homeless services in Seattle, this paper extends this larger critique to disputes over human service facilities and argues that the NIMBY syndrome framework fails to capture the political and ethical complexities of locating human services. A conclusion examines how critical sociologists can still critique imbalances of political-economic power in the planning process without deploying the NIMBY syndrome nomenclature.

With every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Over the past two decades, the global news industry has embarked upon a major project of economic, organizational, and technological restructuring. In organizational terms, successive waves of mergers and buyouts have yielded a global news landscape where most of the larger firms are owned by shareholders and run by executives whose singular focus is on rationalizing news production and improving profitability. Although in some cases, these shareholders and executives have used their authority to influence climate coverage directly, more often their goals are non-ideological: reducing labor costs and increasing revenues. At the same time, in a parallel development, the digital media revolution not only has spawned a host of new online competitors but also has cut deeply into the advertising revenue once enjoyed by traditional media firms. Within legacy news organizations, these industrial and technological trends have converged to dramatically intensify the work pressures facing environmental journalists. For example, in an effort to reduce costs, many firms have reduced newsroom staff to a small core of multi-tasking reporters, supported by a wider web of part-time freelancers. In this process, the science and environment beat is often the first to go, with environmental specialists among the first to be reassigned or downsized (and pushed into freelance work). For all reporters, there is increased pressure to produce more stories in less time on multiple media platforms, a trend that, in turn, enhances the power of special interests to influence climate coverage through public relations and other external information subsidies. Due to these converging industrial and technological trends, environmental reporters now work in a new media ecosystem that is complex, subject to contradictory pressures, and in many ways hostile to the production of high-quality climate news. When the environmental beat is cut, climate change often becomes the purview of general assignment reporters who lack experience and expertise. For their part, freelance specialists continue to cover climate news, but their ability to sustain this coverage over the long term is constrained by their part-time status. Finally, although niche climate blogs have provided welcome spaces for environmental journalists to produce in-depth coverage, these outlets usually reach only tiny audiences composed of the already-engaged. In short, without significant action, the regrettable status quo of climate news—that is, an episodic sprinkling of climate coverage scattered across the media ecosystem—will continue indefinitely. Policy-makers should therefore restore long-term institutional and economic support for environmental journalists specializing in climate science and policy.

In recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity constitutes a powerful form of political resistance. Building on this critique of cultural populism, this article argues that critical audience should refocus its attention on how macrostructures of power pattern, constrain, and are often reproduced within audience interpretations of media texts. In the end, the article presents a model of audience ethnography based on Geertz's notion of thick description, and argues that this model can productively investigate the relationship between powerful social structures and the practice of media consumption in everyday life.

This article argues that the theory and practice of media advocacy suffers from some inherent pragmatic and conceptual limits. One limit is practical: Media advocacy's reliance on journalists working in commercial media radically constrains advocates' ability to reach policy makers and citizens in anything more than an episodic way. Another limit is conceptual. By implicitly endorsing an elitist theory of democracy and focusing on mainstream journalism, media advocacy fails to theorize the crucial role media resources and strategies play within local social change movements. The article concludes by exploring what the theory and practice of media advocacy might look like if informed by an alternative, more participatory theory of democracy as well as a commitment to promoting media reform.Health communication research, defined as the study of how communication processes relate to human health and well being, is a rapidly expanding and increasingly influential subfield within the larger discipline of communication studies (Maibach, 2002). Evidence of the subfield's growth can be found in the impressive number of communication journals devoted to health issues, the number of research grants awarded to health communication projects, and the proliferation of tenure-track faculty lines awaiting newly minted health communication scholars (Thompson, 2003). And, to be sure, there is good reason for this growth. The subfield has generated an impressive diversity of research which explores the relationship between communication and health in interpersonal, organizational, and mediated contexts. Health communication scholars have produced valuable work on, for example, patient-provider interactions, health information-seeking and media use, and the design, implementation, and evaluation of health communication campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, much of this research has subsequently been applied in concrete social contexts to improve the health and well being of individuals around