How newsrooms can track (and reduce) their own carbon emissions

How many carbon emissions does a news video on carbon emissions produce? The video team at Le Monde wanted to find out. 

“The idea first came up in 2019 when we launched Plan B, a video series about climate issues,” says Charles-Henry Groult, Head of Video at Le Monde. “We realised there was an inherent contradiction in the fact that we would be reporting about the climate crisis, but taking loads of flights to do so. We decided to take it as an opportunity to assess the carbon emissions of our own reporting.”

Using data from the French agency for climate, Groult and his team put together an Excel spreadsheet with a few basic formulas. Each time a journalist travelled for a story, they would input the distance travelled and the transport method used (“Paris to Marseille, 750 kilometres, via TGV train”) to estimate the carbon footprint of the trip. They also added a column with a rough calculation of the carbon emissions that a day of shooting video and a day of editing would produce. They then listed the ‘carbon cost’ of each story in the video credits, as shown in the screenshot below.

“We kept the spreadsheet simple – but even these rough estimates were very revealing,” Groult said.

For starters, his team was confronted with some very basic facts — “things that might seem obvious now, but weren’t common knowledge in 2019 when we launched this project”, he said — like the fact that a 600-kilometer train ride across France emits less carbon than a 30-kilometer car journey between two Parisian suburbs.

“That really got us thinking about our own working habits. It also sparked new ideas for stories to report on,” Groult said. “The project ended up being quite fun for the journalists. They even got a bit competitive about it. I remember hearing a journalist say, ‘Ha! I produced the story with the least carbon emissions of the whole team.’”

After collecting data in the spreadsheet for one year, his team then used what they’d learned to establish a few principles.

“We decided that we wouldn’t take flights anymore for reporting done within France. We also decided we wouldn’t use anything other than public transport to travel within the Paris area,” Groult said. His team continues to stick to these guidelines into 2025. 

How the 'Guardian' tracks its own emissions

The Guardian has also been intentional about tracking and reducing its own emissions. In 2019, it published its first official Climate Pledge, which included a goal to reduce its own emissions by two-thirds by 2030.

“To tackle this, we worked with an external environmental consultancy to map out all the different emissions in our operations and our supply chain,” said Julie Richards, Director of Sustainability and Operational Transformation at the Guardian. “Getting that initial data helped us to establish the total size and sources of our emissions, and set targets that we thought were achievable.”

From there, the team focused on its print operation, which the data revealed was the top contributor to their emissions. “Previously, cost was the primary consideration when sourcing paper for the print edition, but now, we also take into consideration the suppliers’ emissions per tonne of paper,” said Richards.

They publish an annual sustainability report to track their progress. As of March 2024, they had cut their emissions by 43%.

In addition to decreasing its overall carbon footprint, these operational changes have also brought financial benefits to the organisation. 

“We can point to small cost savings from having reduced waste in our supply chain. In the grand scheme of things, those savings are not huge, but they still add up,” said Richards. “But we’ve also seen that when we talk about our own environmental commitments, our audience responds positively to it and chooses to support us financially. Our climate pledge is part of our brand and mission, and ultimately, that is what people are subscribing to. It just makes sense for us to be doing this.”

Other big players in the media industry have also set targets to reduce their emissions, including RTÉ, Condé Nast, France Télévisions, The New York Times, the BBC, CBC Radio Canada, and ITV. Many of these organisations are on track to meet their targets.  

What is the most difficult part?

Despite these encouraging initial results, emissions reduction projects raise plenty of challenges. Logistically, it can be just one more demand on newsrooms that are already very stretched for resources. Carbon tracking can also raise some uncomfortable (even existential) questions for journalists.

“We've had people in the newsroom say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we didn't print the paper at all, since it’s our top source of emissions?’,” said Richards. “But you have to weigh that up against the positive impact that the printed product can have. In our case, environmental reporting is a core part of our journalism and we want our reporting to reach as many people as possible – and we also know that having a print newspaper gives us a certain influence and reach, so we consider it worth printing.”

“Thinking about your own emissions can complicate your journalistic work,” agrees Groult. “But that shouldn’t prevent us from having a more nuanced approach, where we look at each case individually and ask ourselves, for instance, ‘Is it worth taking a flight and launching 3 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere to report on this story? Or is there another way we can do this?’”

He cites the recent case of the cyclone that struck the French overseas territory of Mayotte in December as an example:

“We didn’t have a correspondent on-site in Mayotte, and it was a major event happening on French territory. In that case, it was essential for Le Monde to be present, so a plane ticket — or two or three — seemed justified,” he said. “But taking a flight to go to Norway to do a story on carbon capture? That’s a case where a Zoom interview and some drone footage bought from a local journalist is more than enough. There comes a point where we have to accept not going. We have to decide these things on a case-by-case basis.”

There can also be significant organisational challenges in implementing these projects. 

“We tried to scale up this carbon tracking spreadsheet to the wider newsroom beyond just the video desk, but it didn’t work,” said Groult. “Even though the tool is very basic, it’s still a technical tool and you need to onboard people, show them how it works, and convince them to use it. The challenge is not so much resistance from the journalists, but rather the fact that the system is large, making tracking and monitoring more complex.”

In the case of Le Monde, the burden is not only on the shoulders of Groult’s team. The publisher has taken on ambitious carbon reduction initiatives at a company level, for instance moving to data centers powered 100% by renewable energy and switching to greener transportation methods for its newspaper deliveries.

Which newsrooms should track their emissions?

The barriers to emissions reduction can be more fundamental for smaller newsrooms — especially those that are operating in more challenging economic and political contexts.

“I don't think small newsrooms in the Global South are in a position to replicate these kinds of emissions reduction initiatives,” said Jazmin Acuña, co-founder and editorial director of the Paraguayan news outlet El Surtidor. “Our outlets have other needs that are far more critical, like the design and implementation of safety protocols, or access to training to improve reporting skills.”

She told me the top priority for her newsroom is the reporting they do on the climate crisis: “Large parts of Latin America have turned into sacrifice zones [for consumers in the Global North]. People need journalists reporting on these matters.”

Richards agreed that for newsrooms with limited resources, it makes more sense for the focus to be on the reporting. “At the end of the day, the emissions that small or mid-sized newsrooms are causing will be very small on a global scale,” she said. “Whereas the impact they can have on the environment through their climate reporting can have much more influence.”

Acuña also points to potentially counterproductive effects that a ‘track-your-emissions’ discourse can have when applied to individuals and small actors.  

“By putting the spotlight on the emission of a small newsroom,” she said, “we are overstating their capacity to address the fast and urgent transformation the world needs. It takes away the focus from the inaction of the big polluters and those who have the power and resources to make an actual difference.”

She also cited examples of online trolls weaponising the discourse of newsroom emissions to discredit their climate reporting: “The few times we have managed to travel to report on global climate stories, climate deniers and all sorts of trolls have suddenly piped up and cared about the environment, criticising us for taking flights to attend the COP, for instance.” 

In other words, if a newsroom is already giving it their all to report on stories of environmental destruction – sometimes at significant personal risk to its journalists – the cost of tracking and cutting their own emissions could mean fewer investigations, fewer stories, and ultimately, less impact.

Where an emissions reduction project makes sense in a large newsroom, it might not make sense in another.

 “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution or an obvious answer,” said Groult. “It’s a bit like deciding how a newsroom decides to position itself against fake news, or to what extent they decide to give a platform to extremist views – it’s complicated. But in the case of Le Monde, I think if we want to be legitimate in the eyes of our audience on climate issues, we have to accept that there are certain reporting practices we need to rethink.”