Grist Magazine: Online enviro journalism with flair

By Heather Hart: After seven years online, Grist Magazine is known for its in-depth coverage of environmental issues -- and its tongue-in-cheek humor.

Bringing humor to the headlines was "a late-night, fevered, overworked idea, but now it’s kind of become our signature," said David Roberts, a Grist staff writer.

Based in Seattle, Washington, Grist began as an alternative to the stuffy sources of environmental news that existed at the time.

"There’s just so much bad news and ... fear and angst out there that it causes a lot of people to tune out. A lot of people have actually expressed relief."

Roberts started working at Grist nearly three years ago with very little formal training in journalism. He said that helped him bring a fresh perspective to both journalism and environmentalism.

"People get stuck in that old-fashioned, formal style of journalism and they can’t see past the inverted pyramid. There’s great value in that kind of traditional journalism, but it just doesn’t always fit with online. Our readers are younger, they skim a lot and have less patience for that," he said.

"At Grist, we attempt to balance formality and keeping things sounding personal while still maintaining trust and keeping our facts straight," Roberts said.

Roberts spends most of his time working on Gristmill, the site’s blog, but also occasionally contributes stories and columns. Aside from Roberts and "muckraker" columnist Amanda Griscom Little, Grist relies on submissions from freelance writers for much of its content.

In just the two years since Roberts started working at Grist, the online magazine has grown by leaps and bounds, doubling their monthly traffic – now about 600,000 visitors a month – and nearly tripling the staff.

"We’re trying to speak to a younger generation" in order to get them interested in preserving the environment, Roberts said.

Online is the future of the news media, according to Roberts. "All major print media outlets are aggressively moving online. In the next two to three years it looks as though their online operations will be more important than the traditional print medium."

Online journalism is still a relatively new and untested medium, Roberts said, so it will still be a long time before it will realize its full potential. In the coming years, he predicts that online journalism will "continue diversifying. It looks as though it will become much more community-based with a lot more multimedia, allowing more interaction from readers and minute-by-minute accounts. Online has the benefit of moving much faster than traditional outlets, even TV."

The publishers of Grist have also been turning their eyes to the future, said Roberts.

"It’s tricky to keep what works and what people like and also evolve with the changes" in the medium, he said. But the future of Grist will probably include a lot more community involvement and multimedia and adding more impromptu and spontaneous elements to the blog.

"Even with all of that, though, I don’t think we’ll ever really lose that tight, old-school, heavily sourced and fact-checked style of magazine writing. There’s a certain credibility and more trust that comes with that kind of journalism."

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