Who Will Pay for Climate Reporting?

The news business, if you haven’t heard, is a mess.

Against the worrisome backdrop of a steep drop in newsroom jobs, 38 climate and environment reporters gathered at Flathead Lake Biological Station, in Montana, in early October for two days of in-depth talks. Representing big metro dailies, national print and radio outlets, and nonprofit pioneers, we had an impossibly large task: discuss the future of climate journalism.

Though reporters are busy telling the stories of our rapidly changing world, the news business is in a two-decade decline. U.S. newspaper reporter and editor jobs dropped by 1,300 in 2025, according to the Medill Local News Initiative using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since 2005, about 60 percent of newsroom jobs at the country’s print publications have vanished. Add to that, digital newsrooms, the disruptive newcomers, witnessed a net cut of more than 1,300 journalism jobs last year.

Along with the journalism jobs market, trust in institutions is plunging nationwide. Gallup polling indicates that only Congress ranks lower in Americans’ esteem than newspapers or TV news. A presidential administration openly hostile to the press only sows more doubt about the bona fides of the Fourth Estate. Talk about unsettling findings for an industry that is critical to the functioning of a democratic society.

How about climate reporting? Network news, for one, is strangely silent on the topic of climate change. Media Matters, an industry watchdog, analyzed coverage of U.S. heat waves in June and July at ABC, NBC, and CBS and found that the climate context was…well, absent.

“Not one segment connected the nearly back-to-back extreme heat events to climate change, including segments that described the conditions as historic, exceptional, or record-breaking,” Evlondo Cooper of Media Matters wrote. The three networks aired 194 segments about the heat waves over a four-week period.

This was the context for climate and environment reporters gathered in Montana. Organized by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, the convening was part graduate seminar, part brainstorming session, part group therapy. It was an opportunity for frank conversations about the impediments to covering a gargantuan story that touches everything.

Above all, what business models will sustain it?

The advertising-driven model failed a generation ago with the advent of the public internet. Hedge fund and corporate owners have bled city papers dry. Some of the survivors – the Salt Lake Tribune, for one – have transitioned to a nonprofit structure. The New York Times, a legacy behemoth with more than $2.8 billion in revenue in 2025, is an outlier and nearly as much a games and recipes business as a hard news organization, at least in terms of subscribers. Revenue experiments pop up everywhere – events, public funding, sponsored content – but it’s safe to say an industry-wide solution has been elusive.

Nonprofit outlets, large and small, have taken up some of the slack and performed admirably. ProPublica, now cultivating local news talent, is the gold standard and a perennial winner of national reporting prizes for uncovering misdeeds and corruption. Smaller newsrooms at Investigate Midwest, Inside Climate News, and Grist have absorbed talented environmental reporters let go elsewhere. Local and state nonprofits like the Baltimore Banner and Texas Tribune are an invigorating presence. Still, staff numbers are a fraction of those during the news-gathering heyday, and national-scale nonprofits, despite the quality of their work, have different audiences than those reached by local newspapers, which can translate climate change, and provide relevant details, for the people directly affected.

Reader support is essential for community connection and can be a vital source of funding. But that’s often not enough to keep small and rural news outlets afloat. Nearly 8 percent of counties have no locally based news source, Medill found. Many nonprofits rely on the same pool of large foundations, which can be fickle in their interests. One major funder pulls out and the whole enterprise is at risk of toppling. RIP Hakai Magazine and California Sunday Magazine.

In Montana, I moderated a panel on measuring the impact of reporting. I posed two questions to frame the discussion: Impact for whom? And impact to what end?

Those questions led to a series of corollaries. Is an informed citizenry not enough? In a quantified era of metrics and KPIs, do journalists need to prove their worth to funders by documenting whether their stories remake society? Is that an unfair standard? Policy change is often a hallmark of accountability reporting, but change can take years to ferment.

In that vein, do funder goals and timelines align with the goals of journalism? Circle of Blue started reporting on the links between farm chemicals, water pollution, and rising cancer rates in the Midwest in 2022. Four years later, after public agitation that was facilitated by scientific assessment and a continuous stream of reporting from local and national outlets, those issues are now leading concerns in the Iowa governor’s race. Political prominence for Iowa’s polluted waterways was not an overnight phenomenon.

Often large-scale change requires the right mix of timing and luck. Lead in drinking water spiked in Washington, D.C., in the early 2000s. But removing lead drinking water pipes did not become a national imperative until outrageous circumstances of racial inequity and penny-pinching aligned in Flint a decade later. 

News outlets are the lungs of the body politic, circulating information to the citizenry in the same manner as oxygen. In this instant-gratification, short-attention span age, is an informed public enough justification for readers and foundations to invest in the hard work of news gathering and government oversight? Or does the enterprise require more voice, more style, fewer words, more video, more something else?

We did not cure journalism’s woes in two days at picturesque Flathead Lake. But I think we posed the right questions as industry pressures – and the temperature – continue to rise.

Lead image: Wildfire smoke clouds the sun in northern Michigan in July 2026. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue