Reporting Green

By Maya Payne Smart
May 29, 2009 06:21 PM

Trish Riley began covering environmental business stories more than a decade ago when “green” at most publications meant dollars not the environment. She wrote about contracting opportunities with the Everglades restoration project, energy-efficient architecture and slipped in environmental asides when editors wouldn’t let sustainability take center stage.

“That’s how I managed to do environmental coverage all these years,” she said. “Newspapers didn’t want to frighten readers or alienate advertisers.”

Times have changed. Now major newspapers and magazines devote special sections and even whole issues to the subject. A Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism study found that more than half of the “green” business coverage between 2000 and 2007 occurred in the final year, and business editors who responded to an associated survey all agreed that consumer and corporate appetite for green news showed no signs of waning.

Today a growing corps of business reporters, columnists and bloggers try to make sense of a mire of company-proclaimed eco-friendly innovation from organic cigarettes to alternative energy to the nascent green investment industry backing it all. But more green business coverage doesn’t necessarily mean better coverage.

Riley likens journalists’ rush to cover the environment to companies’ hasty launches of greening projects to win stimulus money. She worries that reporters aren’t taking the time to properly vet sources, deflate industry jargon and present readers with the information they need.

“If they are going to be doing this job, they need to be doing an accurate job of it,” she said. “They need to learn how to listen with skepticism to any kind of information that they are given and do the investigative work to check it out.”

Maura Judkis, the Fresh Greens blogger for U.S. News and World Report’s money and business section, said “one thing that will become increasingly important is trying to separate ‘greenwashing’ from what’s real.  So many companies know green is very marketable and they are taking advantage of that.” They co-opt terms like green and sustainable, stretch the truth, hide trade-offs or otherwise spin their products to appear more eco-friendly than they are, she warns.

Immersing oneself in the field, finding gaps in reporting and exploring them is a good way to get up to speed quickly.

“I put 100 blogs in my Google Reader and started reading everything that people are writing on my beat,” Judkis said. “It’s important to find a way to not shout into a crowded room.”

When done well, green business journalism has the power to transform the way companies view their social responsibilities—and their bottom lines.  Bill King’s enterprise reporting on the enormity of waste produced by athletic facilities and their efforts to reduce it for Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal won acclaim from readers and journalists.

“Seeds of Opportunity,” the centerpiece of an environment-themed issue printed on post-consumer fiber paper, went far beyond the run of the mill carbon-neutral day at the ballpark kind of story to probe the complexity of the tradeoffs inherent in improving large businesses’ environmental practices.

Amid pages of behind-the-scenes views of composting initiatives, recycling thrusts and trees planted to offset air travel-produced greenhouse gases, two numbers likely left the largest impression on readers: the $250,000 the Seattle Mariners franchise cut from its utility bills and the $1 million the Philadelphia Eagles saved.

“Don’t lead with the social impact,” King said.  “I think people gloss over on that at this point. People reading that story on the business page or in a business magazine expect it to be a business story so it’s important to cover it in that way.”

And dollars aren’t the only numbers business journalists should pay attention to when covering green stories.

“I learned early on in the reporting process that when somebody says ‘we are going to be carbon neutral or we’re carbon neutral for this day, they have to have done a study and charted their carbon usage,” he said. ;“If you want me to write about how much you are putting back you have to tell me how much you took out and how you got there.” Asking companies for their carbon studies is the quickest way to thin the PR smog.

Numbers also help journalists part the substantive from the symbolic. In King’s reporting, they revealed the difference in environmental impact between placing some solar panels on a training facility and using wind power for all of a stadium’s electricity.

“For us as business publications writing about the environment, we do this because it’s the right thing but that doesn’t get the story anywhere,” he said. “You have to make a business argument.”

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism