Canary news
A cool new chapter for Volts.
Hey everybody! If you follow the energy space, you’ve probably heard already: there’s a new media outlet in town.
Earlier this year, the venerable outlet Greentech Media was unceremoniously shut down by the research firm Wood Mackenzie, leaving a hugely talented staff of journalists and editors out of work and the green media space a little smaller.
Now, the think tank RMI has stepped in and hired the journalists and editors in question in order to launch a new, independent outlet: Canary Media.
Canary will be covering both climate change and the transition to clean energy. To begin with, it will be led by GTM veterans Eric Wesoff and Jeff St. John and feature the writing of journalists Julian Spector and Emma Foehringer Merchant. (Here is Wesoff’s post introducing Canary.)
Over time it will grow, offering, in Wesoff’s words, “insightful reporting backed by world-class research across the broad domains of electrifying everything, renewable generation, modernizing the grid and reducing the carbon footprint of transportation, buildings and heavy industry.”
I will be Canary’s “editor at large.” I wanted to explain to y’all exactly what that means.
First, I’m still doing Volts. Volts is my thing, my baby, my No. 1 squeeze. My primary source of income is still paying Volts subscribers and my primary responsibility remains to them. If you are not yet a paying subscriber, please consider becoming one. There will always be exclusive content for you on Volts.
I’m not an employee of Canary so much as a partner — a supporter, a contributor, a frequent guest, and an ally. I will still be following my own interests and writing my own pieces on my own schedule (i.e., slowly), but those pieces will also be featured on Canary (when they so choose). I’ll be showing up on their podcasts and doing the occasional AMA over there.
Canary will be helping me with editing, via my long-time Grist editor Lisa Hymas, soon to be a Canary editor, as my great luck would have it. I’ll be able to draw on Canary’s podcasting squad for help making my podcast more regular and better produced, and on RMI for help with research.
My hope is that many Canary readers will become part of the Volts community, and that all of you, my beloved nuts and volts, will become frequent Canary readers. It’s going to be win-win all around. Here’s to more and better clean-energy journalism.
On Thursday at 3pm Eastern over at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, veteran climate journalist Andy Revkin will be chatting about the Canary news with a crew of people including Wesoff, RMI’s Rebecca Cole, and me, with a few special carbon-wonk guests. Tune in!
Meanwhile, over on Canary:
a Canary newsletter — the peanut butter to Volts’ jelly (subscribe here);
Justin Guay takes a close look at corporate “net-zero by 2050” pledges and comes up skeptical;
Jeff St. John on how cities and counties can expand their clean-energy portfolios.
I hope the Easter Bunny brought everyone lots of chocolate over the weekend!
This is fantastic news David.
RMI introduced me to the idea of green buildings. I found one of their catalogs in a youth hostel in Boulder in 1995, and got to tour their HQ a few years later. They were my first real introduction to the idea that environmentally-sensitive design could be _better_ for people than the alternative. (I was raised Libertarian, so this was a genuine revelation.)
On the flip side, they are the group that originally convinced me that sustainability was primarily an engineering problem. If only...
Nice Save!!! My hat is off to all who played a role.