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Andrew Revkin’s Big Job
By BradStenger | April 29, 2008
Andrew Revkin, climate change beat reporter and blogger for NY Times, has one of the most important and difficult jobs on Earth. He’s watch captain as the planet undergoes epic transformative change, and as the impacts pile up in accelerating fashion. While his writing and reporting are up to the task he’s been handed, it’s his exceptional productivity and willingness to experiment that make me confident he is the right person for the job.
A recent post outlines his upcoming plans and he asks for suggestions. Please give him your help. And somebody give him a raise.
So even as humanity is in the midst of conducting the vast “geophysical experiment” of rapidly altering the global greenhouse, a growing array of people — scientists, communicators and campaigners in their various realms — are also experimenting with new ways to consider and respond to this problem (or issue, in the parlance of the White House).
Dot Earth has greatly lengthened my workday, eating up time that could be spent reporting stories for the printed paper (or being with family and friends). But I believe it’s unavoidable, necessitated by the nature of our times, in which complexity and uncertainty shape events as much as the things we understand well. The days when the media could do their job by summarizing developments of the day — epitomized by the reassuring Walter Cronkite signoff, “And that’s the way it is” — are long gone.
That said, I will be shifting a bit more of my workday back into reporting and writing for print in the coming months, so my post rhythm here may slow a bit. Themes I’ll be exploring, both on the Web and in the paper, include the question of whether the next (and necessary) green revolution can be “green” in the environmental sense. I’d be happy to hear from you on that.
Topics: Content Management, News Gathering, News Interfaces, Productivity |
April 30th, 2008 at 2:12 am
To be honest, I disagree. I am an academic (having worked as a journalist and editor for 14 years), and use peer-reviewed critical thinking to assess the media. Andy’s work is informationally biased, falling into the trap of making the arguments of climate change look distorted by ‘balancing’ a huge consensus with a handful of skeptical views. When I assess Revkin’s work using these academic arguments, it just doesn’t stand up. One Australian academic, James Risbey, has in fact directly approached Rivkin’s work, and showed it to be inaccurate in its terminology and language.