Looking for the climate in Southeast Asia's newsrooms
Climate issues are everywhere - but where are they in Southeast Asia’s newsrooms? We asked editors and news managers from 40 news outlets in a Reporting ASEAN survey – and here we share what we found out.
What instantly stood out from their answers was that more than 80% said the climate was important for their newsrooms (40 of them, from eight countries). But nearly 80% of the news outlets also do not have sections or products focused on the climate - meaning climate outside of the more typical news category of ‘environment’. (Full story on survey highlights here, with data viz.)
‘Importance’ can also be reflected in the habits, editorial investments and structural setups of newsrooms - and this survey zeroes in on those that are particular to the Southeast Asian context.
Did you notice how Southeast Asian countries, especially CLMV, aren’t always included in global reports and studies on the news media? That’s a gap I wanted this survey help fill too. If global reports do include Southeast Asia, they usually have the so-called ASEAN-6, or some of them. Much more common are reports that include first-world markets like Japan and South Korea.
Our questionnaire (translated into some local languages) also asked the editor-respondents: Who produces their climate-related stories? How much do they rely on wire-agency material? Do their stories come from events and briefings, more than ideas initiated within the newsroom? What are the challenges to building climate proficiency in newsrooms? What are the most doable steps to making them climate-enabled?
What’s the usual climate-related story like? From the insights from the ‘Climate in Our Newsrooms’ survey, it is likely to come from attendance of a scheduled event/press conference rather than from enterprise reporting, and to be produced by a reporter in a beat other than environment or climate. At the same time, most of the climate stories that newsrooms run are those done by in-house staffers - though the proportion of stories from wire agencies is significant.
Some surveyed news outlets had climate-focused reporters, while many others did not. One Lao news manager said that any journalist in their team can report on the climate, which is encouraging too, especially since climate is a news perspective and not just a news topic.
Climate proficiency is also about editors and copy desks who know the issue well enough to drive coverage, edit stories and give feedback. A Vietnamese editor said their desk does not have enough skills to do this. (In our previous webinar, I made the argument that we need to free the climate from the limits of news beats and the silo of ‘environment’.
Climate is a multi-beat, all-of-newsroom story, one that requires news professionals to be updated on because our world has changed. As journalists, we are part of this story as well (and part of the human species that changed our planet in this anthropocene age).
Typically, a news site’s tabs divide content based on geography (world, regions) or sections like news/features/opinion/business/sports/lifestyle, or formats like video, podcast, multimedia. Not all have a section on the ‘environment’ and even fewer, on climate.
Yet a growing number of news outlets have made it policy (and habit) to include a brief explanation of global warming inside stories. For instance, a story about typhoons will have a sentence that says these have been becoming more extreme due to the climate crisis, how so and why. Journalists can use the phrase ‘human-caused climate change’ instead of just ‘climate change’. We can review the terms we use in our reports. Apart from helping countering climate misinformation - these are very doable journalistic practices, whether you’re a big or tiny newsroom (and needs no funds!).
Singapore’s Straits Times has some of this context in stories. Also, it differs from general media outlets in the region in that it has both an environment and a climate change editor.
From elsewhere in Asia, I came across some interesting initiatives on climate coverage. Japan Times has a Boiling Point series on extreme heat issues. Public broadcaster NHK is producing programmes on the climate crisis along with five other stations.
There are conventional ways of working in news — and change takes work. I hope this survey provides us some data to help us see better how we currently do things in our region, although surveys like this don’t allow us to ask the whys and hows, and this one cannot be representative.
Southeast Asians are among the world’s communities most vulnerable to extreme weather and the disasters they bring about - and they are also our audiences. (Large parts of the region are still feeling the impact of Typhoon Yagi in Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Weather agencies are warning of floods and other storms on the way. But most of the Mekong basin is actually in extreme drought.)
Thus far, mainstream news remain the most popular source of information about the climate, going by the 2024 Southeast Asia Climate Outlook by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. But, a worry point: the percentage of respondents citing mainstream news outlets as their source of climate information declined to 36% from 49.2% in the 2023 survey. Plus, more people are relying on social media/influencers (28.7% in 2024, up from 18.1% last year) and messaging apps for such information (13.4%, from 5.1% in 2023).
We’re having a webinar in October on our survey results (and more) - stay tuned.
Johanna -founder/editor of the Reporting ASEAN series