Why I’m Starting an Environmental News Venture…
… and hope it’ll help save environmental news
For anyone who’s been “in” environmental and science news for the past few presidencies, the Trump era is like the Bush administration on steroids. Trump and his agency chiefs, notably Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, have the same ideological commitment to private profits over evidence-based environmental and public health policies, with none of the (relative) regard for political norms or legalities, or even executive management skills, that sometimes checked the Bush team’s actions.
The Trump administration has worked hard in its first year at undercutting necessary programs, regulations and policy reforms from the Obama era and beyond.
Reporters around the country have steadily ferreted out remarkable information about those actions and their consequences.
But even the biggest revelations on the enviro beat never seem to rise above the 24-hour cable news fixation on D.C.’s palace intrigues and political maneuverings, as well as the very real weight of the FBI’s Russia investigation. So for my Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism news venture, I’ve founded (de)regulation nation, a weekly newsletter that amplifies reporting on the latest environmental and public health moves of the Trump administration.
I invite you to sign up for the (de)regulation nation newsletter, and follow the related @deregtracker Twitter account.
(de)regulation nation also features updates on who’s fighting back across the political spectrum, and what’s going right as many communities, cities, states, businesses and groups continue to work at solutions to climate change, protecting wild lands and animals, and many other problems.
My research shows there’s an audience for this newsletter:
- In a February 2017 Gallup poll, for the first time in 18 years, more than half of American adults polled said they were dissatisfied with “the quality of the environment.” It was an eight-point jump from the final year of the Obama presidency, Gallup reported, noting that “changes to environmental regulations have been among the Trump administration’s most sweeping policy reversals.”
- In May 2017, a Pew Research Center survey found that more than half of American adults believed that the Trump White House was doing too little to protect the environment, and viewed government regulations as necessary to encouraging consumers to use more renewable energy.
- Just as important as opinions are news-reading habits, and here I’m on firm ground as well: 38 percent of Americans get their news online, according to a 2016 Pew survey. Most do it via mobile devices, which are great delivery platforms for email newsletters.
(de)regulation nation is driven by current events. The past twenty years of the news business, and my experiences within it, are what led me to the Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellowship.
Say “the news is broken” to a random selection of American journalists, and most will nod their heads in agreement.
In case you missed it: The rise of digital media over the past 20 years has gutted the advertising income of news outlets, which for most was their primary revenue stream. Since digital advertising rates are much lower than print rates (tl;dr: mass versus niche audiences), thousands of reporting and editing jobs at newspapers and magazines nationwide have vanished along with those ad dollars.
As a digital producer, reporter and editor for most of my 16 years in journalism, I’ve “come up” in the profession in parallel with the intense downward pressure that the news industry’s revenue crisis has put on freelance rates. Despite working my way fairly quickly into great assignments national publications, paying the bills has been a perennial nail-biter.
Landing a full-time environmental reporting job in late 2014 didn’t insulate me for long from the broader revenue crisis, either. After just two years on staff with a digital magazine, our parent media company announced it was making the “pivot to video,” and got out of the words-and-photographs news business. The entire editorial team was laid off, along with most of the social media and technology staffs.
This involuntary confrontation with the news industry’s faltering business model continued as I returned to freelancing in 2017. Editors often gave me assignments that were harder-hitting and better-paying than I’d had before the staff job. But not better enough, often enough to stop me from asking myself how long it would be before I was priced out of being a journalist.
That was the main question that led me to take a step out of the intellectual and emotional familiarity of being a lone reporter on a mission to uncover the truth, and apply to the Tow-Knight Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellowship. If I’m going to come up with financial solutions that will let me and my fellow enviro reporters keep doing the work we love, I need to understand the business side of the news industry.
It’s an undiscovered country, for sure. The business side of solo freelancing as a journalist and consultant doesn’t turn out to have much in common with creating a news product or a media business. But I’ve always loved to travel.
Originally I’d hoped to start (de)regulation nation as a podcast. But I’ve learned from some of the many leaders within NYC’s entrepreneurial news scene who have spoken with us over the past several weeks just how popular newsletters remain with news consumers, and how to make them resonate with subscribers. Also, as a veteran digital journalist, I already have a lot of experience curating and writing news summaries. So given the “lean startup,” fast-iteration mode of entrepreneurship that Tow-Knight Center advocates, pivoting to publishing a newsletter has made a lot of sense.
A newsletter is also a great medium for forging a two-way relationship of trust with (de)regulation nation’s readers, a crucial component of evolving this into a revenue-generating venture.
I haven’t given up on making a podcast, however. Thanks to the tutoring and advice of CUNY J-school senior audio engineer Chad Bernhard, I’m working towards producing a pilot episode by the end of the semester.
