Five independent climate journalists are teaming up with a “pop-up newsroom”

Going independent usually means losing the collaboration that comes from working in a newsroom. Journalists operating on their own don’t have access to editors or colleagues to work through stories, unless they decide to hire some on their own. But a new team-up from five climate journalists aims to pave a different path.

“Betting the House” is a “pop-up newsroom” that consists of Emily Atkin, of the climate newsletter HEATED; Rachel Ramirez, a former CNN climate reporter who now writes a newsletter called The Confluence; Chase Cain, formerly of NBC and now the creator of the YouTube channel Chase What Matters; Ben Tracy, previously a climate reporter and CBS and now a video producer at Climate Central; and Tracy Wholf, who now runs the company WereWHOLF Media after being laid off from her job as coordinating producer of CBS’s climate team.

The project received support to cover reporting costs from Covering Climate Now, an organization founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in association with The Guardian and WNYC in 2019 to support climate journalism.

Over the course of five months, Atkin, Ramirez, Cain, and Tracy chose a topic to report on together — they landed on housing — and went out to report stories across the United States on the topic. Atkin went house-hunting in Florida’s “climate danger zone,” Cain reported on the home insurance crisis looming over New Orleans, Ramirez wrote about a clash between private property rights and public beaches in Hawaii, and Tracy produced a video about how coastal homeowners in North Carolina and Connecticut are adapting to a changing shoreline. Wholf, stepping into a role similar to the one she had at CBS, acted as editor and coordinator, organizing team calls and looking over drafts.

“The idea, really, is that as much as this is a climate story, it was also about how we can create new models for independent journalists to operate,” Wholf told me. “When major publications all report on the same thing, it elevates a topic and it gets more attention. So we decided to do the same thing and swarm-report on housing.”

The “pop-up newsroom” has a dedicated landing page on Covering Climate Now’s website with links to each journalist’s newsletter or YouTube video, and the journalists are all linking to the other works in the project on their own channels. Wholf says this works because the journalists don’t feel they’re in competition with one another and that they all have distinct individual styles. Ramirez’s newsletter, which focuses on oceans, for example, draws a different audience from Atkin’s, which describes itself as a “newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.” The hope is that by linking to each other’s stories, each journalist will see a boost in subscribers — paid or unpaid — to their own channels.

“It’s taken a lot more time and energy than I initially anticipated, but it’s also felt like it’s been worth the investment,” Wholf said. “We need to start coming up with new ways in which we can function and operate and grow, and so our real goal here is to just try it out. We see this as, hopefully, an example that any beat could follow.”