The latest issue of Nordicom Review brings together two new studies on environmental journalism, theorising how sustainability can be framed in journalism, alongside research tracing how the language of climate coverage has evolved in Danish media over time.
Clarifying the Concept of Sustainable Journalism
In “Sustainable Journalism Redux: What Are the ‘Cornerstone’ Media Frames of a Sustainable Future?”, Peter Berglez, Ulrika Olausson, and Mart Ots address the growing but often loosely defined concept of sustainable journalism.
The term “sustainable journalism” has been used in several ways within journalism studies – sometimes referring to the economic sustainability of news organisations, and at other times to journalism that supports sustainable development goals. While the authors acknowledge the advantages of such a broad perspective, they also note that when the concept comes to represent too many things simultaneously, it becomes difficult to distinguish it from other forms of journalism, such as development journalism.
Addressing the need for greater terminological precision, the researchers theoretically elaborate sustainable journalism as a set of particular media frames.
They introduce three analytical frames: the three-pillar frame, which brings together the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability; the time-reflexive frame, which situates events within longer temporal horizons by linking past developments, present conditions, and future consequences; and the cross-spatial frame, which highlights the global interdependencies of sustainability issues by connecting local developments with national and international dynamics.
The Changing Language of Climate Reporting
A second article in the same issue, “Shifting Semantics: A Longitudinal Study of Keywords in Climate Change Reporting” by Mikkel Fugl Eskjær and Florian Meier, focuses on how climate change has been described in the news.
The researchers analyse over 46,000 Danish news articles published between 1990 and 2021 to track the use of three widely known terms: greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change.
Their findings show a clear shift in terminology over time. In the 1990s, climate reporting was dominated by the term “greenhouse effect”. In the 2000s, “global warming” became more prominent, before gradually giving way to “climate change”, which emerged as the dominant term in the 2010s.
Using computational semantic analysis, Fugl Eskjær ad Meier show that each term is associated with different associations and kinds of discourse.
The term “greenhouse effect” tends to appear in technical discussions closely tied to atmospheric science and greenhouse gases. By contrast, “climate change” appears in a wider range of contexts, including discussions of environmental crises, societal impacts, and global political challenges.
Both articles are availbale Open Acess and can be read here.