After speaking with various individuals in sustainable marketing and design, and having spent the last 20 months immersed in better understanding the fields, I’ve come to some conclusions that I’d like to share with you.
News can be great for environmental scanning and sometimes better understanding a market, bit by bit. But just reading the news and commentary will take you a lot of time and effort to develop actionable insights. There’s just too much information out there! The explosion of media outlets for news and commentary has been great in so many regards particularly the long tail, but what has inevitably happened is an abundance of choice which places greater burden on the user to filter, scan, and absorb. For some, this process can be fun. However, there’s plenty of nonconsumers of news media who are just too busy with their personal and professional lives to visit multiple websites, newsletters, and read magazines. For them, the mass media (online or off) doesn’t provide them sufficient value that helps make their lives better or enjoyable for the time/money invested.
In speaking with fellow marketer Peter Korchnak, he relayed that many of his clients are small businesses and for he and them, media stories on sustainability primarily focus on big corporations - a segment that represents only a tiny proportion of the business community in any country. Considering this fact, one has to wonder: How can media really make a positive difference in the lives of people?
In my opinion, the value that news and commentary media provides is best handled by a professional whose job it is to observe and analyze it for either curated environmental reporting or actionable intelligence which is then provided to the people who need it most. Otherwise it may just provide a time sink for people.
What we’re left with in terms of real value is the following: education, best practices aligned to specific contexts, case studies, and research - all of which take more time & money to produce than news and commentary media. For people willing to learn, the outlets that provide these services include professional journals (to a degree), seminars, workshops, books, reports, databases, and educational/training organizations.
If we’re increasingly living in a limited-attention span world due to larger numbers of media outlets and personal & professional activities competing for our attention, it only makes sense for folks to participate in what brings them (and perhaps their staff), the biggest bang for their buck or hour-spent.
Everything else is ephemeral brain candy and activism/journalism.
Although I caught the irony in that this post was a commentary, I’ll continue to try and bring you valuable content to here on my blog that will either enlighten, educate, and sometimes delight you 
