Yale E360: Small Staff, Global Stakes

The African hornbill looks like something out of the age of dinosaurs. It also, as it turns out, could be indispensable to the future of African forests. Large and bizarre-looking, with a long, curved bill topped by a hard helmet-like structure called a casque, it inhabits the tropical forests of central and west Africa, where it plays an irreplaceable role as a seed disperser. A single large hornbill can carry seeds a dozen miles from a parent tree, seeding future forest in degraded patches of land that ground-dwelling mammals can’t reach. Without the hornbill, many experts warn, restoring Africa's carbon-storing forests becomes significantly harder.

Last November, Yale Environment 360 published a detailed investigation into the plight of these birds. Writer Adam Welz documented a rapidly growing illicit trade: hornbill heads moving from hunters in Cameroon through voodoo markets in West Africa. Cleaned skulls were sold as novelties online, and live birds fetched up to $16,500 a pair. The story was distributed to delegates gathered at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference in Uzbekistan, who voted to impose new protections on eight of the most-trafficked species — a decision E360 detailed in a follow-up digest.

That story — and what happened next — is not unusual for Yale Environment 360.

In 2022, Fred Pearce, the well-known environmental journalist and an anchor contributor to E360, reported on a proposed 240-mile canal that would divert the White Nile away from the Sudd, Africa’s largest freshwater wetland, draining a swamp that holds four billion tons of carbon and sustains one of the world’s great wildlife migrations. The article was reprinted by both of South Sudan’s major newspapers. Soon after, the country’s president suspended dredging operations pending an environmental review. “Fred’s articles appeared in those two publications,” said Roger Cohn, E360’s founding editor, “and within weeks the project was halted.”

A year later, E360 was the first U.S. news outlet to report from the ground on the humanitarian crisis engulfing the Yanomami people of the Brazilian Amazon, where illegal gold miners had decimated forests, poisoned rivers, bringing disease and starvation to Indigenous communities. The reporting helped spur the Brazilian government to evict the miners from Indigenous lands.

Three governments or international bodies moved to action across two continents. And a publication with a full-time staff that, at any given time, you could actually fit in a phone booth.

Since its founding in 2008, Yale E360 has published more than 1,700 original features — reporting, opinion, and analysis by leading journalists, scientists, advocates, and officials. Last year it drew more than four million views, with more than 40% of its traffic coming from outside the United States. Its 144,000 followers on X outnumber those of Bloomberg Green. Its stories are posted on Apple News, which boasts more than 100 million monthly readers, and syndicated by Yahoo News. They are regularly republished by outlets such as Wired, Mother Jones, and Popular Science, and cited by publications from Nature to The New York Times. More than a third of E360’s regular readers work in government, journalism, academia, or the nonprofit sector.

When surveyed, those readers praised E360’s “level-headed, nuanced journalism” and “scientific rigor.” Asked what distinguishes it from competitors, they gave a simple answer: the quality of its reporting.

All of it produced by what has generally amounted, over nearly two decades, to Cohn, a managing editor, and a full- or part-time senior editor.

Looking for a Real Journalist

“I had the idea of an online environmental magazine based at the school,” recalled Gus Speth, then dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (now the Yale School of the Environment). “I hired Roger to be editor, and, as they say, the rest is history.”

It was 2007. Speth had been inspired by Yale Global Online, a web publication the university had launched six years earlier, and he was convinced a similar model could work for the environment. He reached out to Cohn, who had recently left Mother Jones, where he had served as editor-in-chief, and was teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley. When Speth began making the case for New Haven, Cohn stopped him. “I said, ‘I know that. I lived there for four years.’” He had been an undergraduate at Yale — a connection Speth hadn’t known about when he called.

Cohn, whose background was in print journalism, was candid about his one real hesitation. “I told Gus, ‘I don’t know anything about the web,’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, you’ll learn.’” Yale’s president, Rick Levin, helped secure the initial funding — “Without Rick’s support,” Cohn noted, “I don’t think it would have happened” — and by early 2008, E360 was taking shape.

Speth’s vision required the right person to execute it. “Gus was looking for a real journalist,” said Fen Montaigne, a veteran National Geographic writer who would become E360’s senior editor for its first decade. “He knew that were it to become just a promotional vehicle, it would not have the necessary credibility. And in Roger, he found a great journalist.”

No Agenda Except the Truth

E360 launched in June 2008 into an unlikely environment. A financial crisis was contracting newsrooms across the country; environmental coverage was being pulled back further. Cohn and Montaigne saw this not as a headwind but as a case for what they were building.

The publication they had in mind was broad — not devoted to climate change alone but covering the full range of environmental concerns from biodiversity to water to energy to the built world. It was to be international in scope at a time when almost no U.S. environmental publication was. “We wanted the average reader who was interested in environmental issues, but not necessarily steeped in them,” Cohn said. “We weren’t trying to reach only scientists and policymakers — though we certainly wanted to reach them too. We wanted to be accessible.”

What also distinguished E360 from the outset was its distance from advocacy. Frances Beinecke ’71, ’74 MFS, former president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and a longtime supporter of E360, identified this as central to its credibility and reach. “What Gus conceived, and Roger executed was a true environmental journal that was consistent in its coverage and wasn’t associated with the advocacy or the movement,” she said. “That gave it a broader general audience.”

Elizabeth Kolbert ’83, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a regular contributor since E360’s first issue, put it simply: “It doesn’t have any agenda except the truth.”

Montaigne described an editorial bar that left little room for mediocrity: stories that didn’t “advance the topic” were, in Cohn's phrase, “thin gruel.” Pearce put it from the writer’s side: “He doesn't require you to follow the line of consensus in the environmental community. If you’ve got something unexpected to say, do say it.”

Seeing Around the Corners

The inaugural issue was strikingly prescient. Bill McKibben contributed a piece about the world approaching 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a threshold that would shortly become an organizing principle for the global climate movement. Ecologist Carl Safina wrote about ocean acidification, an issue that, as Cohn noted, “had never been discussed outside of academic journals before.” Kolbert wrote about the two presidential candidates — John McCain and Barack Obama — who both publicly accepted the science of climate change and pledged to act on it.

Cohn reflected on that first issue with some wonder: “We were very prescient. The stories we led with were ahead of what other publications were covering, and some of them — the McKibben piece especially — turned out to anticipate the defining issues of the next decade.” Kolbert’s observation about E360’s habit of getting there first has held across the years: “A lot of really important and fascinating stories have run in E360 first. You will often notice that other publications then follow it.”

A key decision, obvious in retrospect, would prove transformative. E360 would exist entirely online — there was never serious discussion of a print component. “If we’d been a little print publication,” Montaigne noted, “it’s incomprehensible to think of the difference in impact.”

And the Oscar Nomination Goes To…

One story that came up repeatedly in conversations about E360’s impact is a three-part series from 2017, “Environmentalists at Risk,” reported by Fred Pearce with Pulitzer Center support. It examined the killing of environmental activists in three countries: an Indigenous leader in Honduras, murdered for opposing a hydroelectric dam; a land-rights activist in Sarawak, Malaysia, killed amid conflict with palm oil developers; and a community organizer on South Africa's Wild Coast, where a proposed titanium strip mine had brought deadly conflict. “We were one of the first major media outlets to cover the issue of the murders of environmentalists internationally,” Cohn said. Katherine Bagley, then managing editor of E360 and now editor-in-chief of Grist, remembered the demands it placed on a tiny team: “It was such a delicate topic — you’re really having to gain the trust of sources and the community on which you were reporting.”

E360 also invested early in visual storytelling. A documentary about the village of Qiugang, China — where residents fought a cluster of chemical plants poisoning their water and air, took their case to Beijing, and won — was nominated for an Academy Award. Cohn noted that it was one of the first videos produced and premiered on the web to receive an Oscar nomination. A companion film on mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia drew similarly wide attention.

Over more than 15 years, Canadian journalist Ed Struzik built what Montaigne considers some of E360’s finest sustained work: Arctic reporting that tracked the warming and drying of the far north and the fires that followed. “Ed’s reporting has just been superb,” Montaigne said. “Early on he was writing about how a warming climate is drying out the Arctic and leading to more fires, and that has proven to be completely true.”

Their Jaws Drop

“When I tell other editors at other publications the size of my staff,” Cohn said, “their jaws drop.” That staffing level has barely changed in 18 years.

Bagley described a workplace focused entirely on the work. “The conversations we had were never about bureaucracy,” she said. “We were just able to focus solely on producing the highest quality journalism we could produce.”

Jeremy Deaton, who joined E360 in 2021 as managing editor, spearheaded the push to place stories on Apple News, Yahoo News, and other major aggregators. “We’re a small news outlet, so it’s really important to have those other channels,” he said. “Apple News, Yahoo, Wired, Grist, Mother Jones, Popular Science — they allow us to reach a broader audience and get our reporting read by more people.”

More Important Than Ever

The landscape E360 now operates in has shifted considerably from the one it entered in 2008. Newsroom budgets have contracted, and environmental coverage has thinned across much of the mainstream press. “Journalism writ large is under threat and being eroded every day,” Beinecke said. “Having a steady platform of high-quality journalistic information that is global, not mired in U.S. environmental challenges, is just an enormous contribution.”

Speth, whose idea started it all, sees the moment clearly. “The world is going to wake up soon and ask, ‘How the devil did this happen?’” he said. “Folks are going to want solutions. Real ones. What better place to sponsor independent, reality-based reporting, analysis, and commentary than a great university like Yale?”

What Comes Next

After nearly two decades, Cohn is retiring from Yale and will be teaching environmental journalism at a university in Zambia as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar.

“It’s very inspiring,” Beinecke said of Cohn’s next act. “He’s created the highest quality environmental journal, and yet he wants to carry this skillset into another arena and help more people take up the banner for environmental journalism. I have so much admiration for that.”

Newsletter

Subscribe to “YSE 3”

Biweekly, we highlight three news and research stories about the work we’re doing at Yale School of the Environment.

Indeed, the record Cohn leaves behind speaks for itself: 1,700 stories, four million annual readers, new CITES protections for African hornbills, reporting that helped halt a canal project in South Sudan and prompted the eviction of illegal miners from Indigenous lands in Brazil, a Pulitzer Center-funded series on the murders of environmental activists, and an Oscar-nominated documentary.

“There will always be a place for deeply reported science journalism that can inform scientific thinking, action, and policymaking,” said Deaton. “Our role will continue to be important.”

That sentiment is echoed by contributors who have watched E360 grow from the beginning. Safina, who has used E360 as a teaching model in his graduate classes, put it this way:

“Roger has built a fine foundation, and I am excited to see how E360 continues to prosper and bring on the big picture of change, of traumas and triumphs, regarding our environment and the living miracle we are part of.”