"At 5pm on Friday afternoon, The New York Times posted the following announcement: 'The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas. This change will allow us to direct production resources to other online projects. But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.'"
"This is terrible news, to say the least. When the Times announced in January that it was dismantling its three-year-old environment pod and reassigning its editors and reporters to other desks, managing editor Dean Baquet insisted that the outlet remained as committed as ever to covering the environment. Obviously, that was an outright lie.
The Green blog was a crucial platform for stories that didn't fit into the print edition's already shrunken news hole--which is a lot on the energy and environment beat--and it was a place where reporters could add valuable to context and information to pieces that did make the paper. An addendum to the discontinuation announcement encouraged readers, "Please watch for environmental policy news on the Caucus blog and energy technology news on the Bits blog," but without the Green blog, there's no way that these topics are going to get as much attention as they once did."
Curtis Brainard reports for the Columbia Journalism Review March 1, 2013.
SEE ALSO:
Andrew C. Revkin, whose Dot Earth blog is still distributed by the New York Times, has aggregated the Twitter streams of Green contributors into a Twitter list, to which you can subscribe here.
"A Blog’s Adieu" (New York Times)
"A Farewell to Green" (Dot Earth)
"New York Times Kills Its 'Green' Blog" (Grist/Lisa Hymas)
Advertisement 
