Journalism: "Dot Earth Moves to NYT Opinion Section"

I'm sure there will be commentary from all sides. In the meantime here's the straight poop from the Columbia Journalism Review's The Observatory blog:

After two-and-a-half years and 940 posts as a news blog, Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth site will be moving to the Opinion section of The New York Times’s Web site, according to an announcement he posted Wednesday afternoon.

Revkin, who was a staff reporter at the paper from 1995 until he took a buyout at the end of December, launched the environment and sustainability blog in October 2007 and has continued writing it since leaving daily reporting.

“One reason I started Dot Earth is that it’s hard to find space in the newspaper for these other issues,” he said in December 2008, after winning the John Chancellor Award for his roughly twenty-plus years dedicated to climate coverage. “So the blog created a space to keep sustained focus on them.”

Since leaving his staff job, however, Revkin—who has accepted a position as a “senior fellow for environmental understanding” at Pace University—has expressed a desire to move even farther beyond the constraints of traditional news reporting.

“I no longer see journalism, on its own, as the single best use of my remaining days,” he wrote upon taking the Times’s buyout offer in December. “In a world of shrinking specialized journalism, direct outreach will be more vital than ever.”

“There have increasingly been times when I’ve felt that I wanted to give my own straight view of things,” he added in an interview on Wednesday. Nonetheless, Dot Earth won’t look drastically different now that it’s headed to the Opinion section. In his post announcing the move, Revkin wrote:

Don’t expect momentous changes. I’m not going to suddenly be revealed as an ardent liberal or conservative.

I am an advocate, for sure — for reality.

I’ll try to maintain the discipline to be “caustically honest” (to steal a phrase used by a climate scientist in a story of mine on tipping points last year) in weighing the issues and opportunities confronting humanity as its astonishing 200-years-and-counting growth spurt crests.

As a freelance blogger, I will say what I think in ways I could not when I was a Times reporter. I’ll do this in a space occupied by other ex-Times reporters, including Timothy Egan and Linda Greenhouse.

One other facet of Dot Earth won’t change: the blog will remain home to a dynamic, sometimes exhausting exchange of reader comment. Many blogs focusing on the environment seem mainly focused on creating a comfort zone for like-minded citizens. Dot Earth will continue to be a place for the expression of all pooints of view — as long as those views are expressed in civil and constructive ways.

Revkin said that after the leaving his staff job at the Times he and editors had been in open discussion about how to sustain a freelance relationship, and that a “combination of factors” led to the decision to move from news to Opinion....MORE