Keeping Environmental Reporting Strong Won\'t Be Easy

Those who care deeply about environmental issues were understandably concerned Friday after learning that The Times was dismantling its special team - or “pod” - of seven reporters and two editors.

Beth Parke, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, told InsideClimate News that The Times’s decision was “worrying.”

“Dedicated teams bring strength and consistency to the task of covering environment-related issues,” she said. “It’s always a huge loss to see them dismantled … it’s not necessarily a weakening to change organizational structure, but it does seem to be a bad sign. I will be watching closely what happens next.”

On Twitter, Dan Froomkin, a journalist, wrote: “NYT dismantles its nine-person environmnt desk â€" but says that won’t affect climate coverage. How is that possible”

And Ben Grossman-Cohen, writing for OxfamAmerica.org, joined the chorus, calling the decision “an unmitigated disaster.”

Top editors at The Times say that this is a structural change only, and that the paper’s commitment to the topic will remain intact.

In a memo to newsroom staff, the executive editor Jill Abramson mentioned the change in the context of overall newsroom restructuring, amid efforts to reduce newsroom numbers and cut expenses:

We are changing some of traditional architecture of the newsroom, including in the leadership and editing ranks. For instance, we have decided not to continue having separate editing and reporting groups on the environment and how we live. We will continue to cover these areas of national and international life just! as aggressively and Dean and I are having talks with all the journalists in those groups about how to do this without the existing “pod” structure.

Even if there was no fiscal pressure to do so, we would be making some structural changes in the newsroom to balance our precious journalistic resources. In order to expand digitally and internationally in the exciting ways we have planned, it is natural to reshape our contours.

And the managing editor Dean Baquet offered more reassuring words:

“We can tell the story just as well without the infrastructure,” he told me.

As for sheer numbers, he added: “If we have fewer reporters, we won’t have far fewer. We’re still going to have tons of people on this.”

He said no decision has been made on the Green blog: “If it has impact and audience it will survive,” he said.

Andrew C. Revkin, a former Times reporter who now writes the Dot.Earth blog for The Ties’s Opinion pages, told me that the decision does not worry him: “What works best is a group of like-minded people getting excited about something,” and then working with a strong editor to bring the ideas to fruition. He sees this change as one “about efficiency,” not quality of content. His blog post on Friday provided details.

Sandy Keenan, the environment editor, told me she wishes the decision had not been made.

“Of course, I’m disappointed,” she said. “I’ll try to hold everyone to their promise that the coverage won’t suffer.” She is uncertain of her next move, she said.

Elisabeth Rosenthal, a medical doctor and a 19-year Times veteran reporter, who has done outstanding work as part of the environment pod, told me that she sees pros and cons to the pod structure.

“The pro is that you give specific attention to a subject that needs it,” she said. “T! he con is! that it takes the subject out of the mainstream of news flow.” The subject areas “don’t have their own real estate in the newspaper, and that can mean that it’s harder to get attention” for their stories.

“There’s not a lot of news in this area - we’re watching glaciers melting - so there isn’t an urgency to get things into the paper right away,” Ms. Rosenthal said. Integration into the main desks can be a help with that.

Here’s my take:

Symbolically, this is bad news. And symbolism matters - it shows a commitment and an intensity of interest in a crucially important topic.

In real life, it doesn’t have to be bad news. A pod’s structure, outside the major desks - Foreign, Business, National and Metro - by its nature means that the coverage is not integrated into the regular coverage of those desks, which have their own space in the paper and their own internal clout.

If coverage of the environment is not to suffer, a lot of people - including The Time’s highest ranking editors â€" are going to have to make sure that it doesn’t.

They say they will. But maintaining that focus will be a particular challenge in a newsroom that’s undergoing intensive change as it becomes ever more digital while simultaneously cutting costs.