Thinning newsroom staffs and vapor-thin travel budgets won’t support your travel to cover the December 1-12 talks in Poznan on planning for a post-Kyoto climate change protocol?
And add to those concerns a real sense that the talks in Poznan this December - what with a lame-duck U.S. delegation consisting of soon-to-be formers surely out-of-step with what’s expected come Inauguration Day - amount to just a warm-up for the critical talks toward the end of 2009 in Copenhagen.
Your editors figure you’re not likely to get much serious space or air-time for covering the Poznan pow-wow in any event. So why bother?
Enough said. But it doesn’t mean serious climate change journalists, scientists, and other watchers will have zero-appetite for staying abreast of the Poznan goings-on. There will no doubt be feeds from AP and also, most likely, from news organizations such as The New York Times. (The Times’s Andrew C. Revkin is himself pointing to tight purse strings as one reason he’s not going to Poznan, but he says he expects Elizabeth Rosenthal will cover from on-site with Revkin contributing from afar.)
Don’t have a stringer, let alone a bureau, in Poznan? And none in the works for Copenhagen, when the Obama administration’s staff are on tap? So what are your options?
One option is to sign-up for the free reporting service offered by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canadian-based nonprofit research and communications organization.
It’s not to be mistaken as a wholly independent and “journalistic” news organization, as IISD clearly has a strong institutional identity linked to its numerous domestic and foreign government funders.
At the same time, the group has established a strong reputation for the quality, depth, and objectivity of its coverage of important international negotiations on sustainability and climate change. Its four-person fulltime reporting professionals, are complemented by translators and some 60 freelancers from more than 30 different countries, most having or nearing their Ph.D.s or law degrees and many with substantial international experience on environment and development issues.
Reporters and others wanting to test-drive the free IISD reporting services can start by signing-up for “Earth Negotiations Bulletin” feeds from the Poznan negotiations, with daily coverage starting December 1, 2008.