hungry to hear about this

It's encouraging to see some parts of the mainstream media changing the way they think about environmentalism.

The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the New York Times is launching an environmental reporting unit that brings in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks.

The CJR says the unit's editor, Erica Goode, hopes the Times’s more strategic, coordinated approach will capture the variety of ways in which a single environmental issue can touch people’s daily lives.

One example of this was an article in December about the 'passive house,' a new class of cheap and ultra-efficient home being pioneered in Germany (blogged here).

'I can’t emphasize enough how much interest in this subject there is among readers,' Goode said. 'That story immediately went to the top of the most e-mailed list and stayed there for quite awhile.'

'It’s clear that people are really hungry to hear about this stuff. And that was a story that combined some science, some business, some home, and some lifestyle—it went across the traditional boundaries of news departments.' (Ht: Dot Earth.)