How ‘Digital-born’ media cover climate change in comparison to legacy media: A case study of the COP 21 summit in Paris

Abstract

Climate change is often seen as a remote, complex or 'unobtrusive' topic by the general public -a topic about which many people acquire information mainly from media reporting. However, media landscapes are changing rapidly, particularly with the growth of the internet and social media. A number of new media organisations are challenging traditional media and have gained significant audiences for their environment content. We analyse the coverage by three of these -Huffington Post, Vice and BuzzFeed -of the COP21 summit in Paris at the end of 2015, and compare it with that of traditional media. We show that while the general spectrum of themes is similar across media outlets, there are differences in the volume of the coverage and in the emphasis that is laid on different themes by some, but not all, of the new players compared to traditional media.

Climate journalism in a changing media ecosystem: Assessing the production of climate change‐related news around the world

“…Examples include international brands such as the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, both of which have presences in several languages and countries. Many of these outlets, including the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, and Quartz, focus specifically on environmental issues such as climate change and often have feature sections or indexes on these topics, partly because such issues are of interest to their young target audience (Painter et al, 2018). Online‐surveys suggest that such online‐born players have larger audience shares than legacy media in countries where consumers are particularly interested in environmental news (Fletcher in Painter et al, 2016).…”

“…It includes printed legacy news media and radio and television broadcasts, as well as their online presence and mobile applications (apps). But it also includes “digital‐born” media organizations that “are not merely digital extensions of newspapers or broadcasters” (Painter, Kristiansen, & Schäfer, 2018, p. 1), such as Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox, as well as “niche” sites, such as Carbon Brief and InsideClimate News “which specialise in environment or climate change reporting […] and have moved from just aggregation or commentary to original reporting” (Painter, Erviti, Fletcher, et al, 2016, p. 11) 2…”

“…In response to this situation, new journalistic players have emerged that try to balance editorial independence with sustainable business models (for an overview see Küng, 2016). They include “‘digital‐born’ news media organizations who started off on digital platforms” (Painter et al, 2018, p. 1), such as Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox, which use the affordances of social and mobile media and try to produce viral content to generate user traffic and, thus, advertisement revenue (Küng, 2016). Other journalistic models rely on philanthropy, crowdfunding, or audience donations, but their success is hard to evaluate at this point (cf.…”

Laypeople’s Affective Images of Energy Transition Pathways

“…An interesting question is thus whether traditional versus social media and new technologies assume different roles in shaping subjective mental representations. Comparisons of the themes and frames that are used in the coverage of the COP 21 summit in Paris ( Painter et al, 2018 ) or coverage of the IPCC Fifth Assessment report ( O’Neill et al, 2015 ) show that traditional print and online and social media are more similar than one might expect. An analysis of climate change debates on Twitter ( Williams et al, 2015 ) showed that these discourses take place in part in homogenous attitudinal echo chambers constituting segregated and polarized camps of activists and skeptics, but also in mixed-attitude communities in which activists and skeptics interact.…”

Engaging Citizens for Climate Change—Challenges for Journalism

“…While previous research has found that digital-native media and legacy media cover climate change differently (cf. Painter, Kristiansen, and Sch€ afer 2018), and also to some extent analyze the role of alternative media (Hackett et al 2017), there has been little study into how traditional climate change reporting differs from more recent forms of journalism, such as data journalism. Compared to other journalists, data journalists stand out in their vision to create stories that can only be told with the aid of data, thereby uncovering connections that could not have been found using analogue journalistic methods (Appelgren et al 2020).…”