When Reporting On Climate Crisis Is Really Baaa-d
The Los Angeles Times tries appeals to younger audiences with a fleece-flocked, ping-pong-ball-eyed cousin of a Muppet
A rookie reporter named Judeh looks meekly into a bathroom mirror and takes a pair of industrial sewing scissors to his scalp. His eyes are lifeless, but his movements are lively and enthralling behind the news table. A handful of white fleece hits the tile below and a sigh escapes his mouth. He has just had a quick makeover, giving him a flatter, fuzzier cranium stacked on his rod-supported arms.
“And for tonight’s special report,” Judeh says into the camera, “we turn to Utah, to a smokestack Mayor Garcetti once called ‘the death cough of the gas-based electricity generation…’”
Judeh, is the lead for 404 Los Angeles Time’s Sorry Report. And, he is a sheep. Well, a sheep puppet.
“It’s easier to get bad news from a puppet,” 404’s puppeteer, Safi Nazzal, sighs during a recent interview.
Nazzal is a bright-faced young man, with a mustache affixed right in the middle of his youthful face. Nazzal stares past the monitor, just to the left of the screen as we chat on Zoom. “I’m in Tampa right now. I was just hearing about Ron DeSantis taking the phrase ‘climate change’ out of legislation in Florida.”
Communication via writing has long has been one of the primary ways we engage with ideas, concepts, and making sense of larger-scale issues. But as younger audiences phase out from legacy newspapers and magazines, something has to fill the vacuum left by the death of print and, mostly, it’s been social media platforms. Young people are flocking to their TikTok For You pages and Instagram Feed for the latest stories.
Meanwhile, news organizations in particular continue to wrestle with the best way to get the attention of young media consumers focused on environmental — and other — issues. Although most young populations around the world consider the climate crisis the most pressing issue of our time, many young people are not reading articles from actual news organizations about it. So, how is reporting on the environment changing to fit the needs of young people? And how will this change how facts are conveyed?
Young people care the most about the environment, but most of their information about the crisis is condensed into headlines loosely elaborated upon in 45-second TikTok videos made by their peers. In June of 2022, in an attempt at innovating an answer to the riddle of how to engage younger readers, the Los Angeles Times launched a new experimental team called 404 that is comprised mostly of content creators. Its mission is to reach the chronically online generation, and it does so in part by producing an environmental segment The Sorry Report, hosted by a Muppet-like sheep named Judeh.
Short-form content is rapidly becoming the most successful way to be seen by as many people as possible at once for media outlets, but the complexities of the climate crisis are hard to render in one-minute clips, which is on the long end for social media content consumption. The loss of anything more articulate than “fossil fuels bad” has ushered in an era in which the vernacular used to describe the existential issue of climate crisis is either a source of despair, or inter-generational conflict, or just easily dismissed because… what are you going to do? In short, most readers find environmental news reinforces an apocalyptic picture of the a future they can’t control, which drives them away from following the environmental beat.
Nazzal pitched The Sorry Report to 404 after the project had gathered a dynamic team of content creators from across the internet. He stressed that he had no prior journalism experience before The Sorry Report, and that he didn’t fully grasp the policy surrounding a lot of environmental issues before he started reporting. He had this in common with most people. Saying “fossil fuels are cooking the earth” is a lot easier to understand for the average reader than environmental-insider climate jargon.
Nazzal took The Sorry Report as an opportunity to learn how to navigate the environmental journalism beat. It was his way of hands-on learning. Now, Nazzal is a dedicated reporter in a content creator’s clothing and he finds that bringing a rod-puppet (the same kind of puppet as Kermit the Frog) to an interview with the Associate Dean of the Universty of San Franciso’s College of Marine Science spurs a new kind of performance anxiety: the kind where you’re trying to be taken seriously while putting on a puppet show.
The Sorry Report got its title because all environmental news seems to be bad news. As in: “Sorry that I’m the guy who has to tell you this. ” The guy who gets to tell you the news is Judeh. When comparing Judeh to the rest of 404’s video narrators, he is the in-house puppet diversity hire. Other 404 reports are led by a human, but those segments are about Los Angeles landmarks, contemporary issues, and interesting restaurants. Items that are easier to swallow. But having a puppet report on global warming is an ingenious way to get an unwitting viewer to learn a little bit about things like rising sea levels. One tends to let one’s guard down when in the company of a fuzzy puppet.
Bella Ross, Social Media Producer for the nonprofit, watchdog-journalism stalwart Voice of San Diego, understands this. She’s worked at numerous daily newspapers, deploying the power of social media to try to net readers. We met recently over Zoom and it was akin to being invited into Ross’s eclectic bedroom as she recounted her experiences. “This job is explaining things. But I try to explain in a fun and interesting way… It’s like a Trojan horse,” she said. Or, in Nazzal’s case, a prophetic Greek Lamb.
Questions about the quality of this type of short-form are not lost on Ross or Nazzal. It’s engaging, but limited. “Short form video is fun, but it's not very flexible,” Ross laments. “We’re meeting them [the audience] where they are,” she says, meaning that most people get their news from social media and simply adding a link to an article with the post is not cutting it anymore.
“With the climate beat… it's so — grim. People find it easier to ignore the climate stuff because it's bigger than us and it's depressing. Which almost makes the puppet approach more appropriate, because it lightens the brunt of it,” Ross says.
She mentions how this sort of reporting amounts in a way to the memeification of the climate issue, which is an effective way to reach the chronically online audience. There is some evidence of a demand for this form of news. A commenter on one of Judeh’s reels tagged another newspaper, The Mercury News (@mercnews) asking to see something similar in his hometown paper.
@mercnews can you please do something like this? I believe in your reporting!
Meanwhile, there’s been mixed, but mainly positive, response to Judeh and his Sorry Report one commenter asks on a recent Instagram Reel:
Is this puppet an LA Times Reporter? I’m impressed.
To which another user replied: Yeah, they fired everybody, now they’re relying on a guy with someone’s hand up his ass…
Environmental journalism is not in theory different from any other type of journalism beat. It should follow the same principles of journalism and reporters should keep in mind their tasks and responsibilities as they cover the environmental beat. The should employ objective methods while reporting and adhere to a discipline of verification. Due to the polarization of big-ticket issues, such as a warming climate, though, provocative phrasing can be seen as advocacy.
This divide is sharp when it comes to climate reporting, Nazzal says. In his view, it can’t be done the same way as it’s been done for the last 30 years. The argument is that the situation has become too urgent and there should be a new, more provocative baseline for reporting the urgency of climate crisis. Are you being truthful if your reports don’t convey the requisite degree of urgency? Tellingly, in our highly polarized country, less than a third of news consumers believe news outlets should take a clear stand in favor of action to address climate-change, according to a Reuters poll.
For Nazzal, The Sorry Report is a new way to connect audiences to environmental education. “It’s not enough to blame a weather pattern on climate change,” Nazzal relays. Climate science is complex, overreaching and intersectional with hundreds of factors. For readers to get a fleshed out understanding of the nuance of climate events, a 1 minute and 13 second video brought to their homepage by 404 LA Times may not be enough on it’s own.
So, Nazzal is slowly working in more of the written word by using the captions in Instagram Reels and TikToks to convey a little more nuance with The Sorry Report. The effect is of taking a complex topic and splitting it into multiple sketches, which speaks on how young people begin to depend on entertainment for news. For example a handful of Sorry Reports are sketches conveying information about hydrogen power alternatives through puppet banter, quick moving visuals and comedy.
Recently, Judeh has been featuring climate columnists from LA Times and relaying their work through short-form content. He continues to release reports on a weekly basis, and although The Sorry Report is not 404’s most popular segment, it still provides a wide audience with easily accessible and entertaining educational media that fits into their consumption habits.
And, maybe, we need to hear someone, even a puppet sheep, or especially a puppet sheep, say “sorry” for the grim state of the environment.
