Heatmap looks to fill climate-reporting niche

Jason Kottke linked to a new media startup called Heatmap today on Mastodon. As the name implies, the focus of the publication is climate change, and all that is related. Here is founder and editor in chief Nico Lauricella from his welcome post:

I started Heatmap because I wanted to read it. I was hungry to discover the details, nuances, and hard choices of climate change, because that’s where the most interesting and important parts of any story lie. I wanted stories that go beyond the basics and approach the topic as the all-encompassing epic it is.

I don’t know what to think about this. While climate change is something that affects us all and should be broadly on everyone’s radar, I don’t know if this sort of site will work in the long run. We already see a lot of reportage in this space from legacy media and online sites that feature a broader focus. That’s before you take into consideration Substack sites that concentrate on the subject.

The site is charging $80 for an annual subscription, which is not very much if you compare it to the cost of some Substacks, but quite a lot when compared to a lot of legacy media. There’s already some advertising on the site, and looking at which companies advertise on Heatmap could be an interesting trainspotting-esque hobby all to itself. Which companies want to brand associate with this sort of reporting? Which sorts of brands do prospective readers associate with?

The masthead is not very large, but the names on it speak to the subject-matter focus. Lauricella was most recently EiC at The Week, and executive editor Robinson Meyer was a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic, meaning they’ve got some writers with solid experience running these sorts of small, web-based operations in Lauricella and writing about climate in the case of Meyer. Other writers include Jeva Lange who also worked at The Week, Neel Dhanesha most recently at Vox, and multimedia editor Jacob Lambert.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. Meyer in particular comes with a long track record of climate reporting, and his work will likely continue to find a broad audience. The history of startup online media is fascinating, and if there is space for a new publication, climate change might be a decent bet.