Editor’s note: Alex Steffen is the executive editor and founder of Worldchanging, one of the world’s leading sustainability-related publications, with more than 10,000 online articles focusing on the leading solutions to the planet’s problems. He edited Worldchanging’s bestselling first book, Worldchanging: A User’s Manual for the 21st Century, and speaks regularly to audiences around the world. He’s currently reporting from and speaking at Cop15, the United Nations international climate change summit in Copenhagen.
I’m in Copenhagen, where I’m speaking at the Bright Green Expo and the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors, delivering a lecture for the Blekinge Institute of Technology, participating in several other events and giving a lot of media interviews. Meanwhile, the full mayhem of the COP15 summit itself is unfolding here.
COP15 is a pretty astonishing event, with thousands of delegates, journalists and advocates swarming around (or at least standing in lines in) Copenhagen’s large convention center. (You can get the flavor of the event by reading the dispatches from Katie Fehrenbacher, Jonathan Hiskes and Kate Sheppard.) It’s frenetic, and, at the same time, strangely dull.
Dull because, unless you’re actually in the inner-circle negotiating mix (which, by definition, most of the attendees aren’t), very little is going on (or will go on) this week that you could actually call news. Certainly, there will be press conferences and press releases galore, with lots of earnest posturing and position-taking. Certainly, there will be pronouncements from various parties, and some good speeches by famous people. But all of that is stuff everybody else will be covering, too: if you’re an average journalist, you could have stayed home and rewritten the press releases and gotten most of the same information out.
So, in order to file stories, reporters will have to do one of two things: find novel ways to retell the same non-stories all their competitors are filing (usually by trying to get particularly sizzling talking-point quotes from political leaders or advocates) or put a novel spin on the proceedings by pushing an angle no one else has thought of yet. This leads to journalistic contortionist acts.
I’m not mocking here. Though Worldchanging isn’t covering breaking news—I’m here in Copenhagen more to be quoted than quote others—I’ve covered more than my share of big international summits as a reporter, and I know how tough it can be finding something to write about in a news desert, surrounded by the mirage of access.
