Pointless
Over the weekend, I found myself in a room talking about environmental journalism during a training course hosted by Friends of the Earth Cyprus. We were talking about headlines and statements, trying to arrive at something more honest: why these stories so often fail to stay with people.
Because environmental stories really do fail to stay with people. We write them, publish them, and then they disappear. If anything, they are some of the most important stories we write. But importance alone does not hold attention nor does it create connection.
What we were really talking about was distance. There is a certain way we have learned to report “serious” topics. We rely on reports, on data, on official language. It ticks every box of accuracy, but somewhere along the way it loses its pulse. It becomes something the reader understands on the surface, not exactly sensing the point. And if you do not feel it, you do not carry it with you.
What stayed with me from the training was a shift in instinct. To stop asking “what happened” as the first question, and start asking “who does this touch”. An environmental story is rarely about the environment alone, it is about someone adjusting their life, often quietly. A place changing in ways that are easy to miss until they are not. A decision that sounds technical on paper and lands very differently on the ground.
People do not live inside announcements. And maybe this is where local journalism limits itself the most. We stay close to what is said, instead of pushing into what it means. We treat the local as small, when in reality it is where everything becomes tangible. The challenge is to make these stories closer and recognise that readers are not disengaged but rather rarely given a way in. And once you see that, it becomes difficult to go back to writing them the same way.