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Should Journalists Campaign on Climate Change? What Happened When Journalists in a Global Media Organization Turned Climate Change Activists

Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (2018), 44 pp.
"Inspired by the research agenda set out by Fazey et al. (2018) for climate researchers mentioned earlier, one can argue that the most critical question for journalism is no longer about solely informing about the problem of climate change, but about engaging in the how-to of transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic man-made climate change. The Guardian’s 'Keep it in the ground' campaign is one way of tackling this challenge. Yet engagement can be done in several ways. While the campaign makes a powerful case for journalism to engage more in a reciprocal dialogue with the public, adhering to its core value of public trust, but also because a newspaper needs an engaged public to survive - it also makes the case for sticking to what journalism knows best: newsrooms are not set up to campaign like a campaigning organisation. Yet there should be room for experimentation and various ways of doing journalism, especially in a time where new solutions and models are in demand as the old ones crumble." (Conclusion)