What Is Ethical Climate Journalism? HEATED’s Emily Atkin, Inside Climate News Founder David Sassoon, and New York Times Reporter Somini Sengupta Weigh In

When David Sassoon founded Inside Climate News (ICN) in 2007, he knew that shifting the climate information landscape would be an uphill battle: “You come to the climate issue, and you’re immediately confronted with a lot of unethical behavior that is flooding the zone,” he said“The level of deliberate misinformation for decades, and the amount of money that is behind it, is one of the first things you have to contend with and look at squarely.”

Nearly 20 years later, ICN’s nonprofit newsroom employs reporters in bureaus across the United States and has become a hub for in-depth, climate-focused journalism that is free to readers and regularly reprinted by local outlets. As a publisher, Sassoon recognizes that fighting a behemoth requires working together. “We are not in the competitive game of journalism, because in this circumstance, what’s most important is solidarity. There are fewer of us, there are fewer resources, and so we are all about collaboration,” Sassoon said during “Urgency, Uncertainty and Alarmism: Ethical Climate Coverage,” an October panel co-hosted by the New York University Ethics and Journalism Initiative and the University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP).

Persistence – in meeting the diverse information needs of communities and countering misinformation – was a recurring theme throughout the two-hour event, which brought together journalists from nonprofit, legacy, and digital-first publications. In addition to Sassoon, panelists included Emily Atkin, author and founder of HEATED, a popular climate newsletter published on Substack, and Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter on The New York Times’s climate team. The event was moderated by Dan Fagin, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning environmental journalist and SHERP’s director. 

Much like Sassoon, Atkin and Sengupta have charted their own unique paths in pursuing what they view as ethical climate journalism. Atkin launched HEATED in 2019, driven by a desire for tough, independent accountability reporting that explicitly identified and condemned bad actors.

“As powerful people and corporations buy up most of the media with the express intention of turning journalists into champions of power rather than challengers of power, it is our responsibility, particularly as climate journalists, to call out people who gain power and profit from emitting carbon and other greenhouse gases,” said Atkin.

For Sengupta, a veteran reporter on humanitarian crises and international conflict, ethical climate reporting has meant pursuing sourcing and angles that might not immediately register as ‘climate stories,’ but instead highlight both the beauty and challenges of humans’ relationship to the natural world.

“A woman my age who is responsible for feeding her family somewhere in rural Malawi does not have the luxury to sit around and wring her hands about ‘How is this climate change?’” Sengupta said. “For most Americans and most people around the world, climate change may not be the first or most important thing on their plate. So I think relating to that is part of ethical coverage.” 

Persuading audiences also requires thorough and discerning sourcing, even when that means reaching out to the ‘antagonists’ of stories. “There is no moral cause, not even the climate crisis, that justifies twisting facts or relying on flimsy sourcing,” said Atkin.

Preserving the right of response has been central to ICN’s coverage of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of climate policy. Comments from officials may provide additional insight or context, said Sassoon, and “even if they are total spin, the reader needs to see that and show that we made the effort to call them,” to preserve journalistic credibility.

While Atkin reaches out to polluters as part of her journalistic process, she also views it as her responsibility to debunk demonstrably false claims. “If I were publishing the spin that fossil fuel companies or the Trump administration, acting on behalf of fossil fuel companies, were giving me, I might add that [to the story]. Then, I would probably then add a paragraph explaining why what they said was bullshit,” she said.

Balancing perspectives in coverage is particularly complex when covering climate change, an issue where both responsibility and impact are systemic and individual. While Sengupta regularly covers private sector and government policies, she says that accurate reporting cannot ignore the individual, especially in the United States, where data show that individuals have exceptionally high carbon footprints relative to the rest of the world. 

“It is undeniably true that there are a few individual or family-level actions that make a huge difference,” she said. “Part of my job as a reporter is to explain what people can do as individuals, as families, as communities, as voters, as consumers, as investors.”

This kind of editorial decision-making, the panelists agreed, must remain the exclusive domain of journalists. For Sassoon, that looks like keeping ICN’s nonprofit newsroom completely firewalled from its funders and board. For reporters Atkin and Sengupta, that means chasing stories that they know will inform readers, without attempting to anticipate what audiences want to see.

“As a reporter, I want my stories to be read,” said Sengupta. “And sometimes I know I have to do stories that are news that just need to get on the record that may or may not get a lot of eyeballs. Atkin said that the most popular HEATED stories are not always the ones she expects. “If you try and dictate your climate coverage based on what you think is going to get clicks and what you’re it’s not going to get clicks, it’s not going to work,” she said.

What is most crucial as a journalist or publisher is identifying your goals – and how those may differ from those of other outlets. ICN’s mission, Sassoon said, is “primarily educational, providing a steady diet of environmental conversation in every community,” including those that might be skeptical of climate reporting. Atkin, whose outspoken newsletter attracts 145,000 subscribers weekly, is a testament to the unique value of a different model. “Through HEATED, I got feedback from people that doing climate reporting with a voice helped other people understand how they wanted to talk about it. There is a whole choir of people that care about climate change that don’t know the words about how to talk to it,” said Atkin. “Call it preaching to the choir. I call it teaching the choir to sing.”

Watch the full event video feat. audience questions on AI use in climate reporting and covering climate activism below: