The strategy behind covering sustainability

Curtis Brainerd of Columbia Journalism Review interviewed Eric Roston, who oversees sustainability coverage for Bloomberg News, about why the business news organization is covering environmental issues.

Here is an excerpt:

Do you have a working definition of what sustainability means at Bloomberg News?

In two words, it would be “deep strategy.” Companies are looking very deeply into their supply chains, looking at the companies they’re doing businesses with, the countries in which they’re doing business, and trying to figure out where they are open to risks they hadn’t seen before. A longer answer would include asking the question, “What do I have to do to keep my business going indefinitely when there’s intensifying competition around the world for strategic resources?”

Who’s your target audience and why?

The target audience is the global population of smart, successful, savvy news readers. It’s an audience that has questions about the term “sustainability” and understands that the world is changing pretty quickly.

One thing you encounter, particularly on the energy-environment-climate stage, is expectations and predictions about the future, and one thing that excites me about this project is that we can talk about the future in terms of what happened in markets yesterday. The strength that we have here is the ability to talk about the resource crunch with great specificity, and draw out what’s happening in markets and how markets are responding or behaving in this context.

Read more here.