A history of digital environmental journalism at the BBC and the Guardian

Abstract

Environmental and climate journalism is complex, data-heavy, and amenable to visualisation. The environmental beat was therefore well placed to take advantage of the affordances of emerging digital platforms for news from the late 1990s. This article presents a history of digital environmental journalism at two international and digitally innovative media organisations (the BBC and the Guardian), taking an affordances approach. It argues that the beat can be understood as having four distinct but overlapping phases: an initial phase in which journalists availed of the limitless carrying capacity of digital media; a second phase which maximised the use of blogs and user comments; a third, experimental phase involving digital video and online campaigns; and a fourth, mature phase in which both organisations became more strategic in their digital offerings.