WHY ARE YOU CALLED THE LEMONADIST?
If you care even a little bit about the natural world, news about the environment is particularly difficult these days. There’s a lot going on, and a lot of it’s bad news. Could this also be an opportunity? Ecologists learn from change, and there is a lot of change happening. I’m going to dig into environmental change stories with some wonky enthusiasm. Turning lemons into, you know, lemonade.
SO YOU HAVE NO DOUBTS THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL?
Nope. I’m not going to both sides this issue at all. As much as I can, I’ll just ignore the folks who haven’t caught on yet. Climate change is real, and so are a lot of other major environmental crises. Are there sometimes problems with the supporting science? For sure. (See the very definition of science.) The answer is to engage with the science, not to spin conspiracies. What you’ll get here is clear-eyed reporting about how environmental change unfolds. I hope it will help keep your sense of wonder intact, while helping you inform your decisions as a consumer and citizen.
HOW IS THIS JOURNALISM? IF YOU BELIEVE CLIMATE CHANGE YOU’RE BIASED.
In late 2005 or early 2006 I was hired to work as a ghostwriter for the book version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The movie was scheduled to debut that spring, and they figured the companion text for Gore’s famous slideshow was perfect book fodder. Partway through production they realized the book needed a little more length, and I was one of three science writers hired to create some more short chapters.
The job offer posed a dilemma: If I took it, would I be able to write climate news again as an ‘objective’ journalist? I decided I didn’t care. It was time to hop off that fence. I have no regrets. Since then, family circumstances and the continuing unraveling of the journalism as an economic endeavor have meant that I’ve taken a lot of writing jobs that blur the traditional ‘journalism’ line.
For example, I write for some alumni magazines, and yeah, these are hype machines for their respective institutions. But I stopped working for the UW-Madison a couple of years ago. Most of that work was for a specialized alumni magazine. I loved the work, but it was also too close to other kinds of journalism I wanted do. Ending that relationship cleared the decks for other work, and for projects like The Lemonadist.
I’ve also written a lot about cancer for patients. As a science journalist, you can write about cancer from so many perspectives: pure scientific research, drug development costs, epidemiology. But for this work the information needs were very particular: what kind of treatments are available now, and how to make treatment decisions. These patients don’t care about what might emerge from the development pipeline in seven years. One thing I did for that work was to clear all of my quotes with all of my sources. This is frowned on in some journalism circles, but it sure made sense for this niche.
Frankly, the definitions are shifting so fast I’m not sure what to call what I’m trying to do here. I promise to be transparent when I have a relationship with the people or the subjects I’m writing about.
IS THIS A NEWSLETTER OR A WEBSITE?
It’s both. Slack is a pretty obvious choice for newsletters these days, but when I was getting ready to hit publish the platform was going through a rough patch with respect to objectionable content and not entirely transparent about how it might deal with that. Then I dug a little deeper. Free speech is a necessarily uncomfortable space to operate in. I will support your right to say awful things, but that doesn’t mean I have to work in the next cubicle. After some research into alternatives, I realized that the very same thing could happen all over again at Slack, or anywhere else. Plus I had the necessary WordPress skills to set up my own shop. So here we are.
IS THERE CONTENT BEHIND A PAYWALL?
Not currently, and — perhaps naively — I’m hoping to avoid that business model. (See next question.)
HOW CAN I SUPPORT THIS WORK?
I need your help to do this work. Please subscribe, and you won’t miss anything. It costs nothing, and means everything to me. And please follow The Lemonadist on whatever social media platforms you use, even if you’re just an occasional user. As those numbers climb, the economics should fall in line.
Financial support is a huge help, too. Journalism takes time, and journalists have bills. Donations and subscriptions through Ko-fi are a tremendous help. Sharing is also lovely. Social media was supposed to be the savior of media, but now it’s cannibalizing our infrastructure. Ironically, we still need your shares to break through the algorithms. If you know someone who might like a piece, there’s also a plain email share button.
WHO DID THE KICK-ASS INFINITY LEMON LOGO AND THE DOPE LEMONHEAD?
That would be my talented nephew, Emmitt White. You, too, can hire him.