“Everything is a climate story,” said Lyndsey Layton, climate editor at The New York Times. “It’s about the economy, energy and housing. It’s about how we live our lives. It’s about the natural world and other species. The warming of the Earth is affecting everything — the cost of your coffee, chocolate and jeans. … It’s just everything.”
Before The New York Times, Layton spent 23 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. During the pandemic, she was recruited by the Times to serve as deputy editor of the climate desk, and this year she was promoted to climate editor. She spoke with E&P about a 2025 reporting series, “50 States: 50 Fixes.”
“We wanted to show that there are people across the country, in red states and blue states, regardless of politics, who do care about the environment and are trying to make a change and to improve things,” she said.
Climate reporters Cara Buckley and Catrin Einhorn were the two primary journalists assigned to “50 States: 50 Fixes.” Visual Editor Claire O’Neill, Photo Editors Matt McCann and Elijah Walker and other newsroom staff were also integral.
“We wanted to make sure that we had a really good reflection of the country. … And we wanted to make sure that whatever it was we were spotlighting was a real solution, a real fix,” the editor explained.
One installment takes readers to Arizona, to a car-free community; in Connecticut, shucked oyster shells are now being recycled and used to rebuild oyster habitats in Long Island Sound. In Louisiana, rain gardens are mitigating flooding. From each state comes a solution. None of them will single-handedly change the trajectory of climate change, Layton stipulates, but they are examples of practical ways people are making small yet still impactful changes to better their communities.
They created a landing page.
“Conventional wisdom at The New York Times is that landing pages, they used to be really popular, and then they sort of fell out of favor,” Layton said. “But we decided that we were going to do a landing page, because we wanted to have a place where readers who are engaged in the series want to spend time. … It turns out we were right, and the landing page is really popular,” Layton explained.
The stories are visually compelling, with photography and video complements.
“We started getting responses from readers, which was really the most heartening part of this project. We included a call-out in many of the stories, inviting people to write in and tell us what’s happening in their neighborhood and community. To date, we have more than 3,000 messages. And we’re getting fan mail and comments … verbal bouquets from readers, thanking us and asking us for more. It means we have struck a chord. People are responding to these stories,” said Layton.
They also learned that their audience values real-world, practical and locally focused news on climate and the environment. “It’s not all about polar bears at the North Pole. It is about the drought your farm is facing. It’s about the flood that destroyed your neighborhood, and about the wildfires that raged through L.A., which everybody was so shocked by. The impacts of climate change are felt everywhere. There's really no escaping from it. We’re talking about summers where heat waves are really punishing. We’re talking about downpours that dump an extraordinary amount of water in your community. These things aren’t distant. You can feel them. You can see them, wherever you are in this country and elsewhere. … It is at your doorstep.”
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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