‘Journalism is a mirror of the times that we live in. In this sense, climate has crawled up on the public agenda in various ways over time and we as news media have been following this trajectory by writing about it.
What we did differently at Politiken, was to get better at putting the user in front.’
Founded in 1884 and published by JP/Politikens Hus, Politiken is Denmark’s leading daily broadsheet. The newspaper features multiple media platforms including print, desktop, mobile, news app and SoMe.
The print edition is Denmark’s most read newspaper, boasting nearly half a million readers per week, while digital commands 1,204,480 unique monthly users.
Earlier this year, Amalie Kestler moderated a panel session on news avoidance at WAN-IFRA’s 75th World News Media Congress, and explained how she and Politiken had spent the past five years taking a deep dive into this growing phenomenon, after noticing that climate coverage was just not grabbing their readers’ attention.
This led to a newsroom transformation that, says Kestler, pioneers ‘creative spaces for the evolution of journalism.’
Politiken’s approach was to break down inter-departmental silos in the coverage of climate and sustainability by collaboratively training all staff in user-centric storytelling.
The results have been significant: the newspaper almost doubled readership on climate articles in the last five years; climate reporting now has, on average 10%, more readers than all articles in general and other measures, like time spent on page and reader engagement, are also up.
In our latest EDITOR TO EDITOR interview, Kestler shares insights on keeping climate on top of the agenda.
News media faces multiple threats, and Gen AI’s emergence has pushed the existential issue of climate change off the top of the public agenda. How has Politiken addressed climate, especially in this year of AI elections?
The news media plays a different role in people’s lives today than it did in the heydays of journalism, when everyone turned to newspapers for a sense of what’s happening in the world. Now, most people turn to social media and, if we are lucky, to a trusted news brand.
The rise of Gen AI poses both threats and possibilities in the risk of misinformation and disorientation it brings, and in the tools that we should figure out how to benefit from as journalists. And we see news avoidance as a growing challenge.
Despite all these challenges, the climate crisis is still here – as are the other important issues that people need to know about.
We journalists have to figure out how to report in ways that make people prefer us to, for example, doom scrolling on social media, bingeing on the latest Netflix show or spending time on some other leisure app. Our core task hasn’t changed: It is still to bring information and news to people; so, if the readers are avoiding us, we have a problem and it doesn’t help to blame it on the users.
‘We have to ask ourselves: what role is the news media now playing? How can we make a positive difference in people’s lives in this totally different landscape?’
We have to be critical of our own praxis, and our ability to write captivating stories. That’s what we did here at Politiken; we looked at: How are we telling stories? And what can we do to make them more appealing?
We are keeping to the core values of journalism, but we are looking for ways to be more creative in making it.
What different approaches and tools did you employ to revolutionise your climate reporting?
I think the biggest evolution for us was really putting the reader and the user front and centre, and really thinking about the importance of the story and how we can convey this importance in a way that audiences actually want to spend time with it.
This is not lowering the bar of the content of the story. It’s looking at a story from many different angles to figure out how we can get people to stay with this issue; to provide a virtuous circle that gets more knowledge out, and creates a need for more stories – thus: raising the bar.
What changed – what are you doing differently now?
Before, journalism was – in short – mostly a solo act of a reporter, until the editing process. Today, we collaborate much more, in almost every step of the process: from ideation, coaching and editing, to the visuals and the digital and print edition.
That is at least the ideal and when we do, we succeed in getting readers to stay longer with our reporting.
I looked back in our archives to see how climate was covered over the past few decades. It started as more of an environmental angle, with energy journalists writing about the Brundtland report, emissions and energy solutions. After Kyoto it became more and more of a climate beat.
It was interesting to look back and remember that journalism is a mirror of the times that we live in. In this sense, climate has crawled up on the public agenda in various ways over time and we as news media have been following this trajectory by writing about it. What we did differently at Politiken, was to get better at putting the user in front.
We analysed our headlines and discovered that sometimes it was only a few words in a headline that could actually make a difference in whether people would read the story or not.
Then we really worked on the data and visuals, connecting our photographers, graphic departments and designers to work with us in evolving our climate journalism.
And from our results, we see that people are engaging more with our climate stories. The index has risen, and the results have risen.
But we also see that we have to work hard to keep it that way.
The challenge – not only for us, but definitely all the other media institutions as well – is to keep telling captivating climate stories. We have a responsibility to keep this on top of the agenda.
How different is your climate newsroom now?
What we have now is a climate network of journalists who actually sit on other beats, but also write about sustainability and climate. We have monthly meetings in which we try to connect more employees; journalists, photographers, the graphics department, in a dialogue on how to make reporting that is accurate, that is appealing, and that can engage the user.
‘Sometimes they work on projects together, even though one is from the culture desk and one is from the climate desk. And I would love more of this because I think that this creates new creative spaces for the evolution of journalism.’
We created a new position last year, and now have a European climate correspondent whose job is to follow the discussion and collaborate with our Brussels correspondent to cover the climate angle across Europe.
We also ran an in-house competition, asking for pitches for ideas on the next big climate project. We placed posters all around the newspaper to say to employees, ‘Well, we do have a climate editor. We do have people who write about this every day and follow this. But maybe, you are sitting somewhere totally different, yet you have the next great idea. You can pitch it and then you can get the time and the resources to actually make the next big climate story.’
‘This is also a way of trying to connect people who aren’t usually a part of the same desk or who share square metres on a day to day basis.’
The process started internally because we realised that we have to do more, and better, journalistically. Everyone, including our very, very – and that’s important for me to say – competent reporters on this beat, also wanted to evolve their reporting and make it more widespread.
Also, it is important for us to learn from others. So, the evolution started with us connecting the dots internally – setting the grid, like electricity, to power innovations because basically, it’s an innovation project – and the last evolution of this past year was that we invited people to come and talk to us.
Context, you say, is everything – and humour is a noticeable contextual element to your climate reporting.
Yes. Politiken has a long tradition for humour, and for using illustrations and cartoons – but what actually inspired me to look more on this was the EBU report on Climate Journalism That Works, which has an article about climate comedian Matt Winning, that made me think how we can use humour as more than just as an opener, to tell stories.
I think humour definitely has a space here because also because sometimes you just need some kind of comic relief. It’s not easy because it’s such a serious topic – but it is possible, if done the right way.
November 2023 cover illustration introducing a new series profiling those who make a difference in attempts to reach climate goals.
Politiken also has a long tradition for activism – for some, journalism and activism is an ongoing debate. Please share your view on this, especially in terms of something as existential as climate.
It’s true. Politiken is a newspaper that since 1884 has had a tradition for civic engagement – for making Christmas dinner for the needy, for supporting the media in places where there is less press freedom or more recently collecting money for heating ovens and bringing them to the Ukrainian people. In that sense, activism or civic engagement is a part of our DNA.
But we draw quite a sharp line between our reporting and our social activism.
Journalism should be and is always based on journalistic ethics, truth seeking, and facts that are fair and correct. All these journalistic values, we hold very, very high.
On the other hand, we do look at our role as an engaging partner in society in the sense that the issues that we feel are important, we also feel an obligation to write about.
We had a journalistic series earlier this year, and that was about how we measure climate in our economic models. Let’s be honest – this is not a top seller. But it’s quite an important debate, and we have in Denmark some economists working on making economic models that actually take the environment into account.
This debate may seem abstract, or intellectual – but it is really important because how do you measure the value of a bird, for instance? How do you value a bird in the economic models? Is it even possible?
‘How do you value the highways and the green areas that are erased to make way for highways? How do you value that – and get that into the discussion?
This is an example of something we do, not because we think it will interest a lot of readers; we do it because it’s an important story.
And we are in the business of telling important stories.’
See also: Listen up: Podcasts becoming increasingly important for Politiken
The post Mirroring society: How Politiken tackles news avoidance by invigorating their climate beat appeared first on WAN-IFRA.