Moving away from doomer content
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard published a profile of Mongabay’s video program and Lucia Torres, our video managing editor. Torres is currently a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.
Torres discussed how Mongabay’s video strategy has evolved, including putting more emphasis on the journalists behind our reporting and bringing more agency into stories.
“People are sick and tired of doomer content, and they also don’t like ‘climate stories,’” Torres told Sarah Scott Scire. “The simple mention of ‘climate’ scares them away.”
We’ve observed something similar across our other reporting, where audiences appear to be tuning out of emergency and crisis stories. Instead, stories framed around solutions or how people are responding to a crisis are garnering far more interest.
My analysis of the 100 top-performing English-language stories so far this year found that 71% could be classified as either “hope / solution / agency” or “action confronting a threat.” Only 21% fell into the “doom only” category.
