Award-Winning Environmental Magazine To Launch New Sections, Expand Coverage
SEATTLE, Wash.—The online environmental magazine Grist, known for its aggressive reporting and for spiking its news and commentary with a sense of humor, today announced that it has become an independent nonprofit organization. “This change was engineered to help us increase both the scope and depth of our environmental coverage and consolidate our position at the forefront of environmental journalism,” said Chip Giller, the magazine’s founder and editor. Grist plans to immediately begin expanding its stable of top-notch writers, commissioning more investigative articles, and producing more special editions on timely environmental topics. It will also launch a regular editorial authored by the Grist staff.
Prior to striking out on its own, Grist Magazine was a project of Earth Day Network, an international environmental organization. The V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation laid the groundwork for Grist‘s transition to independence by providing a major grant to support the magazine’s work. Readers also played a crucial role, donating more than $90,000 in the magazine’s first-ever reader fundraising drive, conducted solely through email. The total figure set a record at Groundspring.org, the leading online fundraising group that provided the technology for Grist‘s fundraising efforts.
Grist‘s original news and commentary are available on the web at www.grist.org, where readers can also sign up to receive environmental news summaries by email. Currently, tens of thousands of people subscribe to that email service, and the Grist website receives more than 500,000 visits every month. Giller says he expects to see those figures increase rapidly in this new chapter of Grist‘s life: “There are millions of others out there who care about environmental issues. Our goal is to motivate those people to protect the environment by giving them information that makes them think, makes them laugh, and makes them act.”
Grist has an influential and diverse readership, including the heads of local, regional, and national environmental groups, leading scientists, congressional staffers, educators, students, grassroots activists, journalists, and people who care about conservation but don’t identify as card-carrying environmentalists.
“Grist Magazine is a fresh, relevant voice that’s awakening a whole new generation of environmentalists with its incisive reporting and much-needed humor,” said Denis Hayes, chair of Earth Day Network and president of the Bullitt Foundation.
Grist Magazine, based in Seattle, Wash., began publishing in April 1999. Contributors include some of the nation’s leading environmental writers and thinkers, such as Bill McKibben, E.O. Wilson, Jane Holtz Kay, Lester Brown, Mark Hertsgaard, Keith Schneider, and Amory Lovins. A staff of four manages the magazine’s operations. Grist features environmental news stories, opinion pieces, book reviews, an eco-advice column, dispatches from activists, cartoons, animation, and more. The magazine’s slogan: “Gloom and doom with a sense of humor.” All of Grist‘s content and services are available free of charge.
