Innovation in hybrid spaces: 2011 UN Climate Summit and the expanding journalism landscape

Abstract

Media coverage of the 2011 UN Climate Summit in Durban makes evident the blurring of the lines that once separated participants, reporters, activists, and networked publics. While journalists look to media activists for sources, breaking news, and reporting tactics that tap into the new potential of the mobile and networked environment, contemporary media activists devised new ways to do some of the work traditionally ascribed to journalism. This article, based on semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of coverage from three NGOs, the New York Times and USA Today, documents various notions of public good manifest in activist media and newspaper coverage. In the broadest sense, the study addresses the questions: Where do legacy and activist news media differ and where do they overlap, both in terms of content and professional norms? And what are the implications of the emergence of new activist media for the field of journalism?

Keywords

Activist media climate change emergent media journalism journalism field NGOs

During the 2011 UN Climate Summit in Durban, an array of innovative media tools, practices and strategies were employed both by professional journalists working for legacy news outlets and by new-style media activists. In some cases these activists acted as journalists, informing and providing a platform for publics to engage with the issues on the table. Thus, the summit’s coverage included a complex mingling of future and legacy news media products, with the use of digital tools reshaping the pattern of call and response relationship with mainstream media that was typical of global news events a decade ago when internet and mobile communication were new (Gillies, 2010; Russell, 2007). In Durban, rather than simply responding to one another, the speed and proliferation and variety of digital tools seems to have heightened the exchange and further blurred the lines between journalism and media activism. The media coverage of the event demonstrates the ways the lines that formerly separated participants, reporters, and networked publics have grown dim and elastic. While journalists looked to media activists for sources, breaking news, and reporting tactics that tap into the new potential of the mobile and networked environment, contemporary media activists devised new ways to do some of the work traditionally ascribed to journalism. This blurring of the lines between journalists and media activists raises questions about the distinct and overlapping values that are embedded in legacy journalism and media activism.

Legacy news values and common understandings of what is good for the public, or public good, of course, differ across outlets and among national media systems according to economic, cultural, and political factors. Today, however, international professional journalists share a loose set of norms and values, rooted in the professional model of journalism, which has prevailed in the United States since the end of the First World War (Hallin and Giles, 2005; Schudson, 1978). The most universal and celebrated of these values is journalism’s commitment to serving as a watchdog. That is, professional journalists act in the interests of the public by holding the powers that be accountable. And while the notion of objectivity is evolving, professional journalists also see their role as providing publics with objective information – free of the influence of special interest – so that they may effectively participate in public life. To deliver information in an objective or neutral way, journalists strive for balance and they rely on bureaucratically credible sources – members of society holding positions of authority. Public good is, thus, served by the work of journalists in two sometimes contradictory ways: through their commitment to monitoring and challenging authority, and by their amplification of status quo versions of issues and events.

While values embedded in the work of media activists are highly tactical and thus less consistent than legacy journalism, there seems to be an emerging network of global media activists and a set of values that inform the work they do. While media activists of the past were largely dependent on mainstream media to raise public awareness of their issues, prompting media activists to focus their attention on attracting the mainstream spotlight and influencing the content of their stories (Gitlin, 1980), the tools and strategies created and used by media activists today are far more complex and sophisticated – they more dynamically connect movement members and supporters (Castells, 2012; Couldry, 2012); they facilitate the creation of narratives that are collectively shaped and personally resonant (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012); and they hold a more powerful sway on legacy news media (Hand, 2011; Lievrouw, 2011; Russell, 2007, 2011a, 2011b). The aim of this article is to document how public good is manifest both in activist media and newspaper coverage around the UN climate summit in Durban.

Toward that aim, this study examines the various fields of journalism production during the 2011 UN Climate Summit through an analysis of interviews with media activists paired with an analysis of emergent forms of activist journalism, focusing on some of the most innovative and high-profile examples of networked news products and practices at play during the summit. Drawing on previous research on newspaper coverage of the 2009 summit in Copenhagen and the 2011 summit in Durban, it then compares activist media coverage to coverage by the New York Times and USA Today, with a focus on the particular notions of public good embedded in the work of activists and of journalists. In the broadest sense, the study aims to address the questions: Where do legacy and activist news media differ and where do they overlap, both in terms of content and professional norms? And what are the implications of the emergence of new activist media for the field of journalism?

Climate change and summit coverage

The issue of climate change in general and UN climate summits in particular offers a rich but somewhat atypical case to study the changing media environment and the role of new actors, tools, and practices in shaping related coverage. It is a rich case to study, of course, because it brings together a set of international political actors and journalists to form a sort of microcosm of global politics, where power dynamics are played out in real time and in the context of local, national, and transnational concerns and affinities. As climate journalism scholars Elizabeth Eide and Risto Kunelius have pointed out, UN climate summits offer a unique opportunity to study emergent transnational public spheres:

Climate change knows no borders, and is thus a historically unforeseen challenge to global governance and regulation. As a global problem calling for coordinated action, it is the paradigmatic case to look for to encourage the emergence of transnational or global public spheres, i.e. spaces or moments in which networks of communication flows enable and force global and national civil society. (2010: 12)

Studies of the 2009 Copenhagen and 2011 Durban summits demonstrate that while traditional journalists covering the summits tend to adhere to norms of professionalism that privilege the status quo, national political perspectives, and frames that reinforce traditional power relations (Eide et al., 2010), climate change as an issue has the potential to disrupt these traditional power relations, in part because of the transnational networks of activists mobilized around it (Castells, 2009: 339; Kunelius and Eide, 2012: 267).

Previous analysis of coverage of the Copenhagen and Durban summits makes clear that newspaper coverage in the USA, and in many other countries, privileges the voices and frames of national government actors (Eide and Kunelius, 2012; Eide et al., 2010). Analysis that combines coverage of the two summits shows that 43 percent of people quoted in both the New York Times and USA Today were US government officials, 19 percent were scientists or other experts, and 17 percent were members of civil society; only 8 percent came from political officials outside the USA.¹ This suggests that these legacy news outlets adhered to traditional practices, amplifying the voices of the status quo and focusing on national perspectives. Max Boykoff’s (2011) study of US coverage of climate change more generally suggests that journalists covering climate change have created a ‘faux balance’, giving equal weight to scientific evidence of the existence of anthropogenic climate change and so-called climate deniers who doubt its existence. This, he points out, gives an unrealistic picture of the validity and prominence of deniers.

On the other hand, there is a sizable global climate justice movement creating and employing sophisticated tools and platforms to counter this faux balance and challenge the status quo both in terms of coverage and in terms of styles, forms, and norms of coverage. The mingling and separations between legacy journalists and media activists reveal emerging dynamics in the field of journalism.

The journalism field and boundary work

Long before the current era of ubiquitous mobile and networked technologies, Pierre Bourdieu (2005) emphasized the importance of seeing media as an environment shaped by relations among various actors. For Bourdieu, the key unit of analysis in media research was the universe of journalists and media organizations acting and reacting in relation to one another. He wrote at a time marked by sharp distinctions between journalists (producers), and publics (audiences) and thus field theory pays little heed to the role of publics in the field of journalism. He argued that the field is shaped most significantly by journalists’ responses to varying degrees of political and economic pressure and by the ways that journalists position themselves within a tradition and among their peers. Today the field has clearly expanded beyond traditional journalists to include increasing numbers of people who can now create networked news and analysis. Bourdieu’s field theory is indeed more relevant than ever given the context of today’s media landscape, where the codes and norms that guide reporters and editors and that shape the content of news stories are being worked at by increasing numbers of people contributing news product through, for example, blogs, social networking platforms, meta-news or commentary sites, mobile phone instant messaging, and photo and video sites. All of these play loosely with standards and stream easily across editorial borders.

The authority and autonomy of professions in general and journalism in particular have become vulnerable today with the rise of these newly empowered actors and the corresponding do-it-yourself culture that challenges traditional forms of elite expertise (Tuchman, 2009). Within the journalism field, boundaries are constantly being contested and shifted, and in an attempt to protect their boundaries, journalists tend to cling to the norms of the profession and make only superficial adjustments to their content and practices (Lewis, 2012; Russell, 2011b). Yet despite reluctance to change, shifts are taking place in how professional journalists understand and integrate emerging forms of participation into their professional identity and practice (Hermida, 2012; Lewis, 2012; Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012). Seth Lewis argues that this leads to a newly considered journalism logic:

… one that preserves certain ethical practices and boundaries that lend legitimacy, abandons jurisdictional claims that have lost their currency in the new environment, and embraces fresh values, such as open participation, that are more compatible with the logic of digital media and culture. (2012: 17)

That is, as shifts occur in the power dynamics at play in the journalism field, a new hybridity emerges in the news landscape.

The professional norms and practices that journalists are struggling to preserve are, by now, well documented. Objectivity, which has long been the hallmark of a professional journalist, is understood as an ‘enduring commitment to the supremacy of the observable and retrievable facts’ (Glasser, 1984:13), or an assurance that ‘a person’s statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community’ (Schudson, 1978: 7). These rules include first and foremost balance (reporting two sides of the story), accuracy (corroborating evidence with at least two sources), a reliance on bureaucratically credible (believable) sources (Schudson and Manoff, 1986). Journalism ethics scholar Stephen Ward (2011) more recently argues that objectivity needs to be redefined to address the fact that interpretation is an integral part of the work of journalism. That is, rather than seeing objectivity as perfect neutrality, objectivity should refer to a journalist’s commitment to using objective methods to test interpretations. He suggests that instead of seeing journalism products as either objective or subjective, journalists need to develop ethical standards for different formats. Yet in both views of objectivity, emotion or engagement are seen as permissible only within certain, strictly defined circumstances, such as collective sadness and grief over shared tragedies, and moral outrage over breaches of social norms of conduct (Ettema and Glasser, 1998).

According to Zizi Papacharissi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira, the rise of neutrality as a dominant value in professional journalism eclipsed affect in news. They argue that increasingly, however, news is collaboratively constructed out of subjective experience, opinion, and emotion within an ambient news environment. In their study of news storytelling of the 2011 Egyptian uprising against Hosni Mubarak, they demonstrate how affect was a central element of the coverage:

We characterized the news streams we studied as affective, because they blended opinion, fact, and emotion into expressions uttered in anticipation of events that had not yet attained recognition through mainstream media. Combined with the networked and “always on’’ character of social media, the affective aspects of messages nurture and sustain involvement, connection, and cohesion.

Media activists leverage social media channels to become major forces shaping affective news. While their practices and boundaries are less well defined and documented than those of legacy journalists, they do share an emerging set of norms and practices. Many of the scholarly claims made about the public good and activist media have to do with the values supposedly embedded in the technologies used – collaborative, open, conversational, social, for example – rather than the emergent norms and practices of a growing set of activists who are agents in the journalism field. The aim here is to explore the ways media activists, like legacy journalists, are developing and leveraging not only new tools but also a hybrid set of practices that combine advocacy with practices and values traditionally associated with legacy journalism.

Method

This research combines semi-structured interviews with discourse analysis to identify the specific ways journalists and activists described their work and the understanding of public good embedded in that work. The analysis of these comments is placed in the context of a content analysis of summit coverage by NGOs and by the New York Times and USA Today. The interviews were conducted in Durban between 3 and 8 December 2011 and after the summit via Skype. They focused on the communication tools, strategies, and values of leading NGOs working on climate justice, including OneClimate, Global Campaign for Climate Action, and 350.org. These organizations were chosen because they were some of the most high-profile organizations with activist media components at the summit. They produced ongoing coverage, staged media events, and appeared as topics of and sources for stories in traditional news outlets. Interviews are combined with analysis of the summit coverage produced from 9 to 14 December (the final two days of the summit and the three days following the summit) by these NGOs as well as by the New York Times and USA Today, including newspaper, blog, and Twitter coverage. These dates were chosen because they include various types of news stories: multiple protests including the occupation of the conference center hall and several protest speeches made during the summit proceedings; the text of the final agreement; and Canada’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol.

The next sections give a brief overview of OneClimate, 350.org, Global Campaign for Climate Action, the New York Times and USA Today, followed by a comparative analysis of activist and newspaper coverage of the Durban summit. The goal is not to draw conclusions about the impact of social media on mainstream news but rather to better understand emerging practices in the realm both of activism and of traditional journalism content, and how they might be influencing one another and the overall online network of discourses about climate change.

NGOs

Interviews with media activists and analysis of summit coverage by OneClimate, Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA), and 350.org suggest different yet overlapping understandings of public good and distinct histories, goals, and assets. Although there was an occasional editorial, analysis, or press release,² the vast majority of the content produced was not in story form; rather, the coverage was an ongoing flow of audio, video and text updates and links circulating via the organizations’ web platforms, Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook. The three organizations used social media to give people a way to follow and participate in the process, making collaboration with publics and among journalists and media outlets a central element of their coverage.

OneClimate is a project of One World, the UK-based online and mobile communication activist media hub founded by former journalists Anuradha Vittachi and Peter Armstrong in 2007. As Vittachi (2012) explained in an interview: ‘Instead of critiquing media we decided to just do what we say they should be doing.’ OneClimate produces OneClimate Channel – live, ongoing, and interactive coverage of major climate conferences – and allows any site to embed and stream at no cost. The OneClimate team uses journalistic terms like reporter and editor to describe their various roles, but the norms that guide the creation of their content are fundamentally different than those of traditional media. Vittachi says, ‘instead of talking at the audience, we invite them in’ (2012). The goal of the OneClimate Channel is to provide a platform for people around the world to participate in these discussions about climate policy. As OneClimate editor Adam Groves describes it: ‘We crowd source content. We’re a platform for civil society. And we crowd-distribute (if you will)’ (2012).

During the 2009 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, 2 million people tuned in over 4 million times to their web-based video streaming platform, posting thousands of questions and comments on the site and via twitter. Award winning broadcast journalist Jon Snow, of the British Channel 4 evening news show, said:

The Copenhagen summit was the One World news event of 2009. Copenhagen Live turned a news story into a truly participative event through its compelling combination of original activist content, smart social media and an innovative distribution strategy, lifting it far above the operations of the large media organizations with their far greater resources. (Oneworld, 2012)

During the 2011 UN Climate Summit in Durban, OneClimate continued to outdo traditional media in terms of the comprehensiveness of coverage and the innovative use of various streams of content. Live and just recorded interviews were combined with around-the-clock news, analysis, audio/video and social media with summit participants and global publics throughout the event.

During the final days of the summit, the OneClimate live coverage and Twitter feed focused on up-to-the minute information about the negotiations and on protests happening both inside and outside the conference center. There were 170 OneClimate tweets on 9 and 10 December and none after that until 20 December, most likely because the OneClimate reporters on the ground in Durban took breaks as soon as the outcomes were reached and the summit delegates dispersed. The OneClimate Channel website, however, hosted ongoing coverage 11 and 12 December that included updates and detailed analysis and responses to the outcomes, posted on the site by the UK team. They used Twitter to engage the public, for example, asking followers to submit questions for interviews or by providing links to posted interviews. They tweeted updates and quotes from people speaking both inside the meeting rooms and out on the streets. They tweeted from locations where activist meetings and demonstrations took place, offered links to recommended stories in other media, and they were recommended via Twitter by Bianca Jagger and other celebrity climate advocates in attendance, as well as by Democracy Now, the syndicated progressive US radio show starring Amy Goodman.

Global Campaign for Climate Action is the umbrella organization of an alliance of more than 300 non-profit organizations worldwide aimed at mobilizing civil society around issues of climate justice. According to Communication Director Christian Teriete:

We don’t really have positions – [we’re] more about the idea that we grow the number of people who demand climate action. Whatever the outcome of negotiations we need to find a way to talk about it. We need to speak with a united voice or be strategic and broaden the campaign to reach beyond ‘treehuggers’. (2011)

GCCA does this by focusing on media strategies and tools that support local NGOs, including building new tools, providing policy and public opinion analysis, and helping build communication strategies based on the latest communication research. As Teriete (2011) describes it:

We’re growing the base by expanding our messengers and channels. We’re working with people in show business because we think [that] might be an effective way to have our message become part of people’s everyday lives. We’re developing climate change in computer games, music, literature. We’re [attending] meetings with scriptwriters in Hollywood. We’re including military and health officials at our conferences. And we’re investing more on the social media side than on traditional media because most of our member organizations are already trained to get mainstream media attention. And we work to keep the debate true by designing a rapid response mechanism that works to identify and debunk misinformation. And we push counter-narratives that are stronger and louder. We push the good news of positive change. After all, politicians still take a lot of their steer from mainstream media.

In 2009, before the Copenhagen summit, they launched TckTckTck, a marketing campaign symbolized by an open source logo designed pro bono by the international advertising agency Euro RSCG, which became the shared brand for all GCCA allied groups. GCCA also launched in 2009 Adopt a Negotiator (AAN), a team of young people representing 13 countries and nine languages, charged with bringing ‘a human element to a too soulless process’, by tracking and blogging about negotiators in an attempt to put pressure on them to act in the interest of the people and the environment.³ Their in-depth reports on negotiators at various climate summits are posted on the AAN blog and amount to a distributed watchdog enterprise.

During the Durban summit, TckTckTck staff (three in Durban and one in Vancouver) maintained a blog, mostly linking to content produced elsewhere and a separate ‘Live feed’. The 10-member Adopt a Negotiator crew⁴ frequently posted more lengthy, in-depth, first person accounts of the negotiations to the AAN blog. Both projects used Twitter: TckTckTck tweeted 107 times between 9 and 14 December (the vast majority from 9 December) and Adopt a Negotiator posted 52 tweets, mostly links to longer posts or other stories, images and video. Their site had 21 posts between 9 and 14 Dec.

350.org was founded by author Bill McKibben, who in 1988 wrote the first book for popular audiences on global warming, The End of Nature. The book aims to build a global grassroots environmental movement using ‘creative action’ – new ways of organizing that tap into new digital tools and networks to mobilize and organize offline action. Jamie Henn, 350.org Communication Director, explained in an interview that one of the key elements of their communication strategy is collaboration:

We hand over communication to a distributed network. We’ve been super collaborative from the start in part because we are trying to do more than we possibly can alone. We don’t feel like we need to control the message. We’re a more blunt object – just trying to plow ahead. (2012)

In Durban, 350.org joined forces with Avaaz, the global activist organization that facilitates massive online campaigns, to organize and shape the messages of the 9 December flash mob protests, which required sophisticated communication among the groups involved. According to Henn:

… we realize the ability to influence the process is limited. We’re mostly meeting with other allies, conducting youth trainings, creating crisis moments for officials – places or moments where people are forced to respond. We rallied from outside but it was heard and responded to inside. (2012)

One of their key strategies is creating ‘crisis moments’ and compelling narratives to help people understand and mobilize around climate change. In Durban they were more of a force of connections and mobilization than an information hub. They did, however, use Twitter to circulate news of the summit and their website to post original reports, including updates, reports on protests, and on the summit process. The group posted 80 tweets between 9 and 14 December.

USA Today and the New York Times

The New York Times is regarded as the nation’s newspaper of record and the one that sets the agenda for other news media. USA Today is the paper with the widest circulation in the USA (averaging 3.2 million readers daily). During the Durban summit, the Times ran a total of 17 stories and USA Today a total of 14; between 9 and 14 December the Times ran six stories and USA Today ran seven. Times reporter John Broder, who was on the ground in Durban, only tweeted twice, both times linking to stories he had written. Andrew Revkin, Times Dot Earth blog contributor and high-profile climate journalist, tweeted the news from Durban throughout the course of the summit, although he was not in attendance.

Legacy and activist coverage

Protests

Protests were erupting on 9 December both inside and outside the summit. USA Today coverage included no mention of protests. And the Times didn’t run any mention of the occupation of the corridors of the conference center or the ejection of hundreds of delegates from the summit, including Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo, who the paper had profiled just days before. The Times Dot Earth blog ran a glowing opinion post, however, with the headline ‘Young Voices Reverberate at Indeterminate Climate Talks’ celebrating youth protestors at the summit, including Anjali Appadurai and Abigail Borah, college students who disrupted summit proceedings with impassioned speeches. The post recommends ‘the best way to track the finale and afterthoughts is by following #COP17 or UNFCCC tags on twitter’. The post went on to support the students in their contention that the USA is not doing enough to address climate change.

There was a robust and overlapping flow of coverage by all three activist organizations. OneClimate posted news of a full-page ad taken out in the Financial Times. The ad attempted to put pressure on negotiators:

The international campaigning organisation, Avaaz.org, has taken out a full-page ad in the Financial Times this morning. Addressing India, Japan, the US and Canada, it asks, ‘Will they sign Africa’s death sentence?’

The ad has certainly ruffled feathers here in Durban, with its powerful and controversial message causing some consternation – even among other activists. (9 December 2011)

They also tweeted a link to the widely circulating Democracy Now footage of US college student Anjali Appadurai addressing the delegation on behalf of youth NGOs. Appadurai disparaged the process for privileging corporate interest over the interests of people, calling it a ‘powerful address to the conference on behalf of youth delegates’. 350.org and TckTckTck also tweeted links and comments to Appaduari’s speech.

When a flashmob occupied the conference center halls on 9 December OneClimate provided up-to-the minute reporting, beginning with this post:

1:41pm GMT, 9 Dec update from Jeffrey Allen

I was right in the middle of the hall as the flashmob started a few minutes ago. The leader called out two ‘mic checks,’ tons of people converged on him, and signs saying ‘Don’t Kill Africa’ were pulled out from god-knows-where. Somber singing began – a couple rounds of the traditional Ndabele folk song Shosoloza. Then the human mic speeches started …

Their coverage continued, including links to press releases by 350.org and Avaaz announcing their role in organizing the protests, quoting leaders from Greenpeace, Avaaz, 350.org; images of the hall completely filled with protestors; video footage from the heart of the protests and audio interviews with various climate justice leaders, including Asad Rehman, Senior International Climate Campaigner at Friends of the Earth and Kelly Rigg, Executive Director of TckTckTck. TckTckTck posted the Avaaz/350.org release, photos, and links to live footage. They also posted an excerpt with a link to full text on the Greenpeace site of an open letter to governments of the world from Kumi Naidoo, warning them of a ‘restless anger’ and urging them ‘to meet the people’s hopes’ before you meet their anger.

In a post on the conference center flashmob occupation, Adopt a Negotiator editors linked to the group’s flickr photo stream and an excerpt of a widely circulating press release from 350.org, written by Jamie Henn, on the reasons behind the protest. The post also included images, texts, and video highlights of protests and resistance, including references to Appadurai and other youth actions, the occupation and the march. It concluded:

There is a story of hope from Durban – it’s the story of the youth and their allies who refused to remain silent, and who will stand up everyday and everywhere and show the bravery we saw in South Africa. That’s the progress we’re most proud of. (9 December 2011)

Outcomes

USA Today ran two stories on the outcomes of the summit on 12 December, both from Associated Press, one with the headline ‘Climate Talks Fail Despite Warning’; the other ‘Climate Conference Approves Landmark Deal’. The former leads with this:

The hard-fought deal at a global climate conference in South Africa keeps talks alive but doesn’t address the core problem: The world’s biggest carbon polluters aren’t willing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases enough to stave off dangerous levels of global warming.

The article goes on to elaborate on the danger of inertia in the face of rising temperatures. The latter article conveys a completely different message. It begins: ‘A U.N. Climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement Sunday on a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades.’ It cites the usual suspects, including delegates, scientists, and one activist, framing the summit like a contest between opposing forces: political representatives claiming the agreement was a significant accomplishment and ‘environmentalists’ and representatives from developing countries who saw the summit as a failure. Times reporter John Broder wrote several stories reflecting on the summit process and its outcomes. On 10 December in a story posted online with the headline ‘In Glare of Climate Talks, Taking On Too Great a Task’, he critiques the summit process:

Every year they leave a trail of disillusion and discontent, particularly among the poorest nations and those most vulnerable to rising seas and spreading deserts. Every year they fail to significantly advance their own stated goal of keeping the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

That was the case again this year. The event, the 17th conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, wrapped up early Sunday morning with modest accomplishments: the promise to work toward a new global treaty in coming years and the establishment of a new climate fund.

The article goes on to argue that this failure is not the fault of the environment ministers and diplomats who conduct these talks, but rather that the task is too great for this group. The next day (11 December), the same story ran in the paper with the headline ‘Bigger Toolkit Needed to Manage Climate Change’. On 12 December the Times ran another story by Broder about the outcome of the talks, emphasizing the voices of those discontented with the outcome. And finally on 14 December another Broder story ran with a very different tone, focused exclusively on the perspective of Todd Stern, the senior US climate change envoy, who expressed ‘satisfaction’ at the outcome of the talks and praised his team for coming up with the language that finally persuaded India to accept the agreement (by changing the ‘legal outcome’ to an ‘agreed outcome with legal force’).

OneClimate, GCCA, and 350.org all covered the summit by paying close attention to the proceedings and outcomes, and, as was the case with the protest coverage, they linked to and reposted one another’s content, and generated a stream of reporting and opinions. OneClimate coverage included near-constant updates, interviews, and observations from their own staff and the staff of allied organizations, links to background texts, reports on other or ‘big’ media coverage, and content from allied reporters and organizations. For example, One Climate’s Jeffrey Allen posted this on 10 December about GCCA executive director Kelly Rigg:

So ace reporter on the spot Kelly Rigg just grabbed an interview with EU commissioner Connie Hedegaard and Karl Hood of Grenada, who represents the alliance of small island states. They said they are holding firm on their demand that ‘legal instrument’ be the final wording (as opposed to ‘legal outcome,’ which Hood says ‘can mean anything – and it can mean nothing at all.’)

And earlier that day Adam Groves posted:

Just grabbed a few words with South Africa’s lead negotiator, Alf Wills, as he rushed into a 3am meeting. While broadly happy with the progress, he’s concerned by the Kyoto text: ‘The KP [Kyoto Protocol] is a problem. They’ve excluded the Africa proposals … so I have work to do.’

On 12 December, during the final hours of the negotiations, they continued to post video, audio and text updates every few minutes from the proceedings. When the agreement was reached, they posted and linked to various organizations and individuals’ responses to the document, which were mostly critical. In an email, 350.org lamented the outcome, writing of:

… the tough reality we now need to face together: the international climate negotiations – or the US Congress, for that matter – are never going to produce transformative progress until we can break the stranglehold that fossil fuel companies have on our governments around the world.

The email was posted and tweeted, along with other expressions of disappointment at the outcome by OneClimate, GCCA, among other organizations and climate justice activists.

The Adopt a Negotiator site was a compelling source of information-rich first person accounts of the negotiation outcomes. Alex Lenferna, lead tracker of the South African Government, posted a 2500-word response to the outcomes on 11 December. Mixing personal reaction, detailed information about the final document, and quotes and links to other reactions, the piece condemns the political inertia that led to a weak agreement. He ends his piece with a call to action:

I am disappointed with our current global governance systems, but I have seen youth, along with progressive thinkers of the current generation stand bravely against some of the most powerful entities in the world in order to fight for their future. Having seen their tenacity and strength, I aim to continue to play my part in the fight for climate justice, never forgetting the inextricable link between social and environmental justice.⁵

Andrea Arzaba, the tracker of the Mexican government, referred to the results as damaging but, like Lenferna, ends on a positive note: ‘Although the above scenario now seems uncertain, and somewhat depressing, civil society around the world came together in Durban.’⁶ Embedded in the post is a video of young people from around the world describing what they are doing on behalf of climate justice.⁷ And French tracker Sébastien Duyck posted a report (in English and French) on the final overtime hours of the negotiations on 10 December, describing the inevitability of a weak agreement: ‘The proposed texts in themselves are far from satisfactory.’ Linking to a video of Sébastien Blavier of Climate Action Network, Duyck explained the texts and issues that remained to be worked out.⁸ India tracker Priti Rajagopalan wrote: ‘Everybody understands India’s need for equity and everyone supports it. But, their tactic of delaying the legally binding framework time line is slightly obvious.’⁹ These reports offer original reporting combined with personal, country- and youth-specific perspectives, adding material that is unique in both form and content to the coverage.

Canada pulls out of Kyoto

USA Today ran an Associated Press story on Canada’s decision to pull out from the Kyoto Protocol, highlighting quotes from Peter Kent, Canada’s environmental minister. The Times story on the withdrawal was similarly built around quotes from Kent and offered no direct critique or explanation of the implications of the withdrawal.

On the other hand, by the time Canada pulled out of Kyoto on 12 December most of the OneClimate, GCCA and 350.org staff had left Durban and the constant media flow had ceased. OneClimate posted links on their site and via Twitter on 13 and 14 December to several stories by other alternative and traditional news sites, including Alternet, Eco Business, Inter Press Service news agency, Energy Efficiency News, The Guardian, The Pembina Institute, and Climate Spectator. In addition to tweeting responses and links to news of the pullout, 350.org posted a video of Canadian comedian Rick Mercer doing a futuristic skit where he explains to his son the reason why he has to wear a spacesuit to protect him from the heat as a result of conservative crack-pot plans. TckTckTck linked to coverage by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. The only original coverage of the pull out came from GCCA Adopt a Negotiator Anika Terton, who wrote ‘I left Durban 24 hours ago. While not surprising, Canada’s Environment Minister’s latest announcement is an outstanding example of our government’s loyal service to the fossil fuel industry.’ She then described her time in Durban and made a call for action:

I felt proud and incredibly privileged to be part of the Canadian Youth Delegation. In two weeks we have achieved amazing things. We received international headlines! We were so successful in admonishing Canada’s record on climate change that Peter Kent wrote an op-ed in a Durban newspaper trying to justify his position. Yet, the Canadian government continues to bargain on behalf of big oil. We need to make this movement massive. The support that has flooded in over the internet and the ovations from students in a Vancouver school we skyped in has motivated all of us and proven that people back in Canada care deeply. We have to bring this momentum back to Canada, and make this movement impossible to ignore.

Coverage of Canada’s pull out of Kyoto demonstrates that these organizations are not set up, as journalism institutions are, to sustain this coverage on an ongoing basis. Their small staff needs time to take vacations, to turn their attention to other pressing climate-related issues, to regroup and strategize.

Discussion

The USA Today and Times coverage examined here and elsewhere (Russell et al., 2012), reflected an overall tension between two contrasting versions of public good. On the one hand, several stories reflected the perspectives of the power elite – mostly US political actors, suggesting that the norm of neutrality and objectivity through the use of bureaucratically credible sources is alive and well. On the other hand, there was a higher frequency of stories in these outlets that fell under the category of news analysis, editorials, blog posts, and tweets. These stories criticized the summit and its negotiators, reflecting an accountability or watchdog role for the press. The frequent use of genres other than straight news to cordon off stories that were critical in-depth, or to highlight protests, suggests that notions of objectivity may be evolving and, as Ward advocates, increasingly being considered part of the process of interpretation in journalism (2011). That is, when journalists objectively interpret the Durban Summit, they are critical of it and find value in the positions taken by protestors and activists and are better equipped to do their work as watchdogs. By contrast, when journalists use objectivity as a tool to separate fact from value, they write stories that amplify the views of the bureaucratic elite, or worse, create faux balance by highlighting the outlier view of climate change deniers. This tension suggests the recognition of the limits of neutrality when reporting on a crisis, and on the increasing flexibility of professional news to make room for affective news flows, made possible by the invention of or increased use of various news genres. That is, there is an increasing tension between the objectivity imperative, which demands the separation of fact and values, and the moral imperative, which in essence demands the opposite, that affective news flows be incorporated into coverage.

The robust and overlapping NGO coverage of the protests, process, and outcomes of the summit is not surprising given the fact that these organizations were integrally involved in organizing and participating in the protests, and in monitoring and attempting to affect the outcomes of the negotiations. To publicize the issues and actions of the climate justice movement they recycled each other’s work by linking, reposting, and excerpting content. Unlike USA Today and the New York Times, NGO coverage was exhaustive and included the actions and comments of high-profile international and national officials, scientists, civil society, and locally focused grassroots groups. In fact the news flows from activist and social media outlets were so much more robust and dynamic than legacy journalism coverage that even the New York Times referred its readers to Twitter for ‘the best way to track the finale and afterthoughts’.¹⁰

Media content and practices by OneClimate, GCCA, and 350.org, the three organizations examined here, exhibited distinct notions of public good that reflect their various organizational goals. OneClimate was primarily engaged in producing a new style of ongoing news stream that mixed straight reporting with opinion and calls to action. GCCA focused on alliance building and watchdogging; they served as a bridge connecting various groups via their TckTckTck campaign, while also facilitating some of the most in-depth nation-specific coverage with the Adopt a Negotiator program. 350.org used social media to collaborate with like-minded groups, creating newsworthy events and then covering them. These media activists at times reproduce their own views and at other times create open spaces of discourse about climate change. When 350.org organize, mobilize, and then report on a protest, for example, they are essentially reproducing their own specific stance on an issue. But when OneClimate interviews officials and delegates using questions from the public, or when GCCA enlists youth delegates to report on their country negotiator, these organizations are opening up the discourse, going beyond their own specific climate agenda or the agenda of climate justice movement leaders.

All three groups have in common their solidarity with a larger climate justice movement and their use of collaboration as a central communication strategy. Not only do they share resources with one another and recirculate one another’s work, they also encourage public deliberation, connection, and participation by providing opportunities for people to pose questions and make comments, to mobilize on behalf of climate justice, and to participate via Twitter and other social networking platforms, thus encouraging pluralism, or the energetic engagement with diverse forms and perspectives to encourage understanding across lines of difference that empowers publics (Benson, 2010; Bohman, 2000). In one tweet, for example, OneClimate wrote: ‘Hey all, just wanna say: THANKS for rocking Twitter today w/ song of solidarity for ppl on frontlines of climate crisis. It matters.’ They also all act as watchdogs of politicians, corporations and negotiators by reporting on misconduct, ineptitude, and negligence, or by pointing to other media that address this. Finally, all of these organizations report not only on what other climate justice groups are doing but also on how the mainstream media are reporting the events in Durban, suggesting a hyperawareness of the importance of media in the story. Participation and pluralism are both functions of legacy journalism often associated with the public good in democracies, but which have been overshadowed in the era of mass media and commercialization that privileges one-way and authoritative neutral communication over participatory and affective news (Papacharissi and Oliveira, 2012).

Yet legacy journalism and activist media no longer necessarily have opposing notions of public good. While the emerging news environment is still taking shape, what we see, in the case of coverage of the Durban summit, on the one hand, is legacy journalism making room for affective news flows, which in turn carves out more space for critical interpretation of news events and issues. On the other hand, media activists, while varied in their products and practices, are helping to generate and distribute climate-related news, albeit a distinct sort of news that sees public good connected to public engagement and harnessing the potential for participatory publics to emerge.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the MediaClimate team, especially Elizabeth Eides, Risto Kunelius, and Matt Tegelberg, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers, whose input was invaluable.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Adrienne Russell is Associate Professor of Emergent Digital Practices and Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Humanities at the University of Denver.

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