Ask Aparna Mukherjee where environmental journalism falls on the spectrum of newsworthiness, and you’ll get a definitive response.
“Every reporter today is a climate reporter, because environmental stories affect every beat,” says Mukherjee, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).
Sixty percent of Americans say that the impacts of climate change are being felt right now. At the same time, newsrooms have shrunk by 25% since 2008, with “niche” beats like the environment often among the first to be cut. Mukherjee sees this reflected in an SEJ membership that is now more than 50% freelance or part-time.
For more than 25 years, Aparna has worked at the intersection of media, civic engagement, and social innovation. Today, she leads an organization of 1,400 international journalists and academics—at a moment of profound change for both journalism and the planet.
“It’s arguably the best and worst time to be doing this job,” says Mukherjee.
Her challenge is to continue the work of a legacy journalism organization while reconfiguring it to meet the needs of today’s journalists. “The physical newsroom that brought camaraderie and a sense of community to the work is now absent. So how—through SEJ—do we create better connective tissue year-round? How do we connect freelancers to each other and to better resources? How can we highlight more of their work?”
To ensure that environmental journalists can continue their critical reporting on water-related climate stories, the Walton Family Foundation supports organizations like SEJ to build capacity and help members access vital resources.
A former journalist herself, Mukherjee began her career with the Associated Press before heading to Asia as a Luce Scholar. Her coverage included stories about the illegal sale of islands in Indigenous territories in the Philippines to beach resort developers. Eventually, she shifted to business reporting, covering the handover of Hong Kong and its implications for global trade. “I wonder if I had known about an organization like SEJ and the community it offers, if it would have made a difference in my own career,” she says.
For Mukherjee, her connection to environmental causes runs even deeper than her first post in the Philippines.
As a child, her family moved frequently as her father, an engineer, decommissioned nuclear power plants. Eventually, they settled in the Bay Area. “My family is Bengali, and being close to water is just part of how we grew up. We’d go down to Santa Cruz and hang out on the boardwalk. It was just one of those given things.”
Now based in Los Angeles, Mukherjee has found a different kind of waterline. “Most people do not think of rivers when they think of this city,” she says. “But spending time along the LA River has made it a touchpoint for me. It reminds me that water here is not just a postcard coastline; it’s also a story of infrastructure, equity and history.”
In the 1990s, she started the first Earth Day at her high school and spent her spring breaks as an environmental camp counselor. “I used to be the person who thought, ‘Well, if we present people with the facts about what's going on, of course they’re going to care about it.’” Twenty-five years and a career later, Aparna’s mindset has shifted.
“It used to be the planet and then the people. Now, it’s very much the people and then the planet.”
Today’s SEJ is embracing that same mindset—taking a more community-centered approach to supporting climate coverage.
“Solutions journalism,” as she calls it, “is a way for environmental journalists to go beyond the problem by better understanding the communities they cover. There are communities who have been ignored by what I would describe as the legacy media who parachute in during a wildfire, flood, or a storm. But what does it look like to see the water levels change over a lifetime? What are the health impacts? What are the impacts to the local economy? Where is this community finding joy? When they see someone from their own neighborhood asking the questions, sticking around for the bigger story—it builds trust,” says Mukherjee.
Her time running the LA2050 innovation grants challenge deepened that view, collaborating with community-rooted groups working on water and coastlines, including favorites like Friends of the Los Angeles River and Heal the Bay.
“I valued seeing how deploying even relatively small grants could give individuals and organizations the capacity for cleanups, citizen science and public engagement,” Mukherjee says. “It showed me how much environmental work is really about who feels welcome to claim a river or a shoreline as theirs, when they find pathways to participate, to belong to a bigger community.”
To support this approach, SEJ is expanding beyond traditional programming like annual conferences and boot camps to “show up year-round for journalists who are really struggling to do this on their own.”
In today’s landscape, “showing up” can take many forms. A robust mentorship program and issue-based cohorts help journalists connect across adjacent beats such as healthcare and science writing. SEJ also facilitates its own grants program to support in-depth stories and provides other direct resources.
But Mukherjee knows that supporting journalists today also means addressing their broader well-being. “Many are working alone,” she says. “They need support for everything from PPE funding and health care coverage during extreme weather events, to grief counseling following coverage of their own communities, to legal defense and protection from doxxing and other harassment.”
“It builds trust when you can hear directly back from the community…when you can uplift local sources.
For journalists today, Mukherjee says getting a job is just one challenge. They also need to navigate the challenges of doing the job with limited resources and near-constant scrutiny.
What gives Mukherjee hope is this next generation. “When I started in the mid-90s, you mostly knew what your impact was because of a policy change. Thanks to social media, young journalists can see their real-world impact much more quickly, listen to their communities, and shape coverage in a different way,” she says.
Rather than reporting from a distance, the next generation is now more likely to be part of the communities they cover.
“It builds trust when you can hear directly back from the community, online and off … when you can uplift local sources. Social media means you are on all the time, which can be incredibly exhausting but also incredibly exciting.”
In spite of the challenges facing journalists, Mukherjee believes providing the right support can help journalists be more impactful than ever—turning knowledge into power for the communities most affected by a shifting climate. The next generation, she says, “has a sense of optimism that they not only have a voice, but that their work can actually effect change.”
