After more than a year exploring the complex relationship between rural Scottish communities, renewable energy and the need for a dramatic response to climate breakdown through The Power Shift: Investigating Scotland’s Green Energy Boom, The Scottish Beacon is launching a new environmental journalism network.
The Power Shift began with support from the Tenacious Journalism Awards, funding independent, community-based publications to report on how Scotland’s renewable energy boom was affecting their communities. Further support from Uplift allowed us to bring that work together in a special print magazine and a national gathering in Glasgow, bringing journalists into conversation with campaigners, researchers and people working directly on these issues.
The new Scottish Environmental Journalism Network builds on those conversations.
The network aims to bring together journalists, campaigners, writers, students, organisers, researchers and others exploring the climate and nature crisis, and creative and radical solutions to it.
Despite the name, you don’t need to be a journalist to join. In fact, the whole point is to bring people working in different fields together.
Its aim is to cross-pollinate research and journalism, share skills and knowledge, and create opportunities for collaboration.
It asks: Can Scotland produce better coverage of climate change?
TL;DR – Yes we can!
Even as the environmental crisis deepens, the coverage of it, and the priority given to it, seems to recede. And yet the stories we need to tell are becoming more complex, touching everything from energy, land and housing to food, jobs, transport and democracy.
No one field holds all the knowledge needed to understand these issues. Journalists need access to research, expertise and lived experience; researchers and campaigners need ways to connect their work with wider audiences; and people working in communities often have knowledge and stories that are missing from the national conversation.
That’s why this isn’t just a network for journalists. It’s about bringing people working across different fields together, creating opportunities to share knowledge, make connections and collaborate on better environmental journalism.
The Scottish Environmental Journalism Network will meet every two months, mostly online and in person where possible. Members will be able to share research, stories, new publications, data and ideas, as well as hear from speakers and experts and find opportunities to work together.
This is a community of practice that will be shaped by the people who take part.
The network launches online on Tuesday 20 October, 1–2pm. Our first meeting will be a chance to meet each other and help decide what the network should focus on over its first six months.
Find out more and register for the first event.
Can’t make it? You can still be part of the network.
