The Fate of Environmental Journalism

Columbia University has suspended its environmental journalism program. Not because the world needs fewer journalists who are schooled in environmental sciences. Actually, the world needs more of those, lots more. But because jobs aren’t available for them in the suffering journalism industry. The professors who ran the program said in a joint letter, “Although our students are assuming huge debt for knowledge and skills that we think are valuable, we do not feel comfortable exhorting young people to take on that burden when their chances of repaying it have so diminished.” This is not good news.