Out of the Desert!
Friends, this a special No-longer-unemployed edition of Bright Ideas.
In the last installment, my workplace Greentech Media was shutting down after 14 years covering the rise of the clean energy industry. I was heading off to wander in the desert for a while, literally and metaphorically.
I’m back from the desert. This week, my colleagues and I launched Canary Media to deliver daily, independent journalism about the global effort to stop carbon emissions and prevent runaway climate change.
The core group at launch is the team of reporters and marketing pros I worked with at GTM. We’re also joined by venerable clean energy writer David Roberts, whom you may know from Grist and Vox and his own Substack Volts. He will share his singular takes as a Canary editor at large.
That’s just the beginning. We’ll grow from there, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, if you want to help us build our following and stay on top of clean energy news, I’d encourage you to sign up for the Canary newsletter and tell your friends! If you do, let me know so I can personally thank you.
A desert that I’m no longer wandering in. Also known as White Sands National Park. (My photo).
What we’ll be doing
This is a bigger project than what we tackled at GTM. Beyond the familiar topics of solar, wind, energy storage and decentralized energy, we’ll cover the future of transportation, corporate efforts to decarbonize, and the equity and justice questions of who gets hurt and who benefits from the way we power society.
How does one simply launch a news company at this admittedly perilous moment for media business models? We found an eager partner in RMI, a veteran nonprofit in the energy space that is dedicated to tackling climate change. RMI’s leadership thinks having a strong, critical news outlet dedicated to covering this space is a good thing, and we’re happy to oblige.
Here’s how RMI CEO Jules Kortenhorst described the motivation in a recent op-ed.
“We need more leaders to recognize the urgency of the crisis and the opportunities offered by the clean-energy transition. Effective climate journalism is an essential tool for building this understanding.”
We’ll be an independent unit under the umbrella of RMI’s nonprofit structure. That means we’re shielded from the kinds of rapid growth expectations that for-profit investors typically demand, and which media companies often struggle to deliver. But we’ve got full editorial control—we’ll decide what we cover and how, just like before.
This came together swiftly, but also just in time. While I was camping in the dry mountains of southern New Mexico, President Biden unveiled his trillion-dollar proposal for a clean energy and infrastructure package. Simply parsing where that money is headed could keep us busy, but there’s too much else to cover too.
In forming Canary Media, we discussed the concept of “David becoming Goliath,” and I think it captures what’s happening right now. The scrappy startups that GTM followed from their infancy are now billion dollar companies (the ones that survived, that is), and carbon consciousness is permeating all sectors of the economy, well beyond the energy industry per se.
What happens to Bright Ideas?
You might be wondering what this means for the newsletter you’re reading right now.
Short answer: Bright Ideas will keep going alongside my work at Canary.
I started Bright Ideas in the early days of quarantine as a creative outlet for me to think big-picture about the news I was covering in the clean energy space. I wanted to step back from addressing a predominantly professional audience and narrate the rapid ascent of clean energy in language that anyone could relate to. I also learned that many readers respond most to the personal section at the end, where I share the books, recipes, movies and adventures that I’ve gotten up to, often with unexpected energy crossover.
Bright Ideas will continue to deliver those goods.
The Canary Media newsletter, which I’ll have a hand in, will deliver more frequent hard news and scoops on the clean energy transition. Subscribing to that will ensure you’re the first to know about what’s happening in the transition away from fossil fuels.
These will be different but related reader experiences. I hope you give both a try, but the choice is entirely up to you!
Here’s our launch press release, if you want to see more details. I figured I’d leave it at that for today, but look out for thoughts on my desert voyage in the next issue of Bright Ideas.
And to play you out, here’s a little song I’ve been working on to help spread the word about Canary:
