Media With Impact: Building a Community-Driven Model for Environmental Justice Coverage in the Great Lakes Region

Abstract

The journalism sector has struggled with financial strain, a decline in public trust, and an industry-wide shift away from print news since the early 2000s. Due to this financial strain, local media coverage has been on a decline, creating a void of reliable news sources for many communities. This is felt most acutely in underserved communities. The void of community-driven news coverage has been predominantly filled by large, privately-owned, centralized, and corporatized mainstream media organizations that seek to maximize returns through the production of high quantities of stories at the lowest possible cost. Both the decline in local media organizations and the ascendancy of centralized, corporate media have contributed to a growing disconnect between reporters and communities, which have created fewer community connections and more distrust. For environmental journalism in particular, many journalists lack the knowledge, training, and resources to accurately and authentically report on environmental justice issues. To help remedy this situation, there is a growing need and interest to help rebuild environmental media organizations, and individual reporters, to more equitably uplift the narratives of frontline environmental justice communities.

While a limited amount of existing toolkits and literature provide media organizations with suggestions on how to equitably engage with communities and/or how to center equity in environmental and climate change reporting, this study advances the field by comprehensively prioritizing the diverse insights of key stakeholders into a set of recommendations intended for both environmental media organizations and philanthropic institutions. Our key findings are operationalized into a toolkit that provides recommended goals, strategies, and actions for media organizations and journalists to advance equitable and community-based environmental journalism. Thus, our recommendations in this report and our corresponding toolkit are designed to help amplify the lived experiences and stories of frontline environmental justice communities in order to promote community change and, ideally, help reinvigorate environmental journalism.