By Stephanie Zucarelli
Media Party X seeks to highlight unique perspectives that have successfully built cutting-edge alternatives for the future of publishing. One person who successfully blazed such a path is Jillian Green, a South African journalist leading Daily Maverick and its special unit “Our Burning Planet”—one of the first newsrooms exclusively dedicated to investigating environmental issues.
As an editorial leader, Green disproved the notion that editorial specialization requires sacrificing the ability to produce general content, implementing a strategic approach that tripled Daily Maverick‘s audience in a single year.
The “Our Burning Planet” division was established in 2018, triggered by a pivotal event: the severe drought that hit Cape Town (one of South Africa’s largest cities), nearly making the region the first major metropolitan area to run out of drinking water. Faced with this reality, newsrooms put the threat of climate change and the impending “Day Zero” on their daily agenda, ultimately forcing the government to radically alter its water restriction policies.
This is what Green refers to when explaining that environmental specialization did not come at the expense of general news coverage; rather, having a dedicated newsroom enabled more comprehensive reporting across the board.
This focus on hyper-specialization built a vital editorial ecosystem for diving deep into issues of public interest, allowing Daily Maverick to unpack every dimension of the environmental crisis: pollution, global warming, food insecurity, energy, energy transition, government policy, and its sociocultural impact.
Sometimes we get boxed into thinking that the global environmental crisis is only about global warming. We need to expand our understanding of what this issue really means, because it is about how we, as human beings, interact with our world at different levels,” Green explained during the “Big Business Responsibility In Tackling The Climate Crisis” webinar.
To learn more about Jillian Green‘s perspective, register for her keynote at Media Party X.
