Environmental website Grist was born in humble circumstances. Founded as a newsletter by journalist Chip Giller in 1999, Grist evolved into an early blog and found a devoted audience thanks to Giller and his colleagues' casual and often cheeky writing style. For environmentalists, it was a refreshing change from the dry, scientific language normally employed to convince a skeptical public.
“It started at a time when, if you rewind the clock to 2000, only 30% of Americans thought climate change was real and anthropogenic,” said Brady Piñero Walkinshaw, Grist’s 36-year-old CEO. “If you fast forward 18, 19 years to where we are now, about 70% of Americans believe in climate change. But the problem is that people don’t believe we can solve it, and there’s not a belief in connecting it to broader issues of equity.”
As understanding and belief in climate change has slowly ticked up, Grist has followed suit, turning from a snarky blog for crunchy environmentalists to a leading nonprofit newsroom.
Walkinshaw and Grist came together at mutual times of transition. In 2017, Walkinshaw, who had served as a Washington state representative since 2013, was coming off a failed bid for Congress. Having given up his state house seat as well, the Princeton grad and former Fulbright scholar chose to move on from politics and wanted to focus on environmental issues. Previously a program officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he was recruited to Grist by Giller, where his skill set as an enthusiastic fundraiser had immediate impact.
“You have to understand, he came on at a pretty rough time for Grist, when we were running out of money and there were a bunch of layoffs and everybody was kind of freaked out,” said Nathanael Johnson, a longtime Grist writer. “He came on, and bit by bit, put the ship back together.”
According to tax documents, Grist revenue jumped from around $3 million per year between 2015 and 2018, to over $11 million in 2019. Even during the COVID crisis, when other newsrooms and nonprofits have had to make cuts, Grist has seen a funding bump and has been able to keep its full staff, Walkinshaw told Blue Tent.
According to numbers shared by Grist, about 60% of its funding comes from large individual donors, another 30% from foundations, and the rest from a combination of brand partnerships, memberships and earned income. Major foundation support for Grist includes the Schmidt Family Foundation, the JPB Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kendeda Fund and Emerson Collective. Major individual donors include Maia and John Vechey; Laura DeBonis and Scott Nathan; and Nikki Noya and Ken Fields, among others.
“Brady is an incredible fundraiser, incredibly connected, knows how to network, has lived experience in what we wanted to lift up in terms of identity and understanding of environmental issues and how it not only impacts white people, but people of color, as well,” said Michelle DePass, a Grist board member who currently serves as president and CEO of the Meyer Memorial Trust in Portland, Oregon.
For Elise Hu, a long-time journalist and executive at NPR who also serves on Grist’s board, having Walkinshaw run Grist is “sort of like capturing lightning in a bottle.”
“Just to get Brady on board and have him jumpstart a ton of fundraising, but also help steer the organization editorially to be even more relevant than it was before, I think has been fantastic,” said Hu.
Righting the ship and professionalizing a once-irreverent blog
When Walkinshaw took the helm, he was followed only a few days later by Nikhil Swaminathan, who would become his main partner in turning Grist around. Swaminathan, who has an extensive background in science reporting and editing for publications like Seed and Scientific American, came to Grist after a stint at the now defunct Al-Jazeera America, where he “caught the accountability journalism bug.”
“It really had this sort of ethos of giving voice to the voiceless and covering marginalized and vulnerable communities really clearly, and giving voice and bringing the media to parts of the country and parts of the world that tend to go undercovered,” said Swaminathan.
He was hired as a senior editor to lead Grist’s environmental justice coverage and was promoted to executive editor a year later. Swaminathan has beefed up the writing staff and implemented stronger editorial standards and policies, continuing a path of professionalization that began in the years before his arrival.
“He really looks at everyone on the editorial team as he’s cultivating their growth and their talent, and he has a great eye for hiring people, too,” said Eve Andrews, who writes Grist’s “Ask Umbra” column.
Under Swaminathan’s leadership, Grist has published lengthy investigations on sugar cane burning near a school in Palm Beach; health problems for workers in asbestos removal; and holes in a recent New Jersey law designed to protect poor communities from pollution. Grist reporter Naveena Sadasivam told Blue Tent this fall that she had been working on one story for six months, and was expecting another six months of work until publication.
“Not a lot of places have the bandwidth and the capacity and the resources to allow a reporter to work on a project for an entire year,” said Sadasivam, who joined Grist in 2019 after working at the Texas Observer, Inside Climate News and ProPublica.
“It’s one of the best-managed and most well-run places I’ve worked at,” said Sadasivam.
Walkinshaw and Swaminathan steered Grist out of a “dark time”
“It was kind of improvised from the beginning,” said David Roberts, who began his journalism career at Grist in 2004.
Roberts, who now writes a Substack newsletter on clean energy, reflected on attending “a million and one” staff meetings during his decade-long tenure at the site, where editors would endlessly discuss “What is Grist? What are we? What direction should we go? What’s our mission? What’s our end?”
“If I’m being totally honest, I think it has always, or at least while I was there, underperformed its potential,” said Roberts. (Roberts had only positive things to say about Grist’s current iteration, and also credits the site with giving him the freedom and the tools to explore and learn as a journalist.)
In those initial years, Roberts explained, Grist was just a few people pursuing loosely associated journalism and blogging for the early internet. He recalled one colleague whose job was to update their static HTML site every morning.
Like Johnson, Roberts recalls rumblings of discontent at Grist in the years before Walkinshaw took the reins. Roberts, who at that point had minimal contact with other staff aside from his direct editor, wasn’t able to cite specifics but recalled shrinking budgets, layoffs and poor treatment. He left to write for Vox in 2015.
One insight into this period comes from Glassdoor, the anonymous job review site, where posts in the years before Walkinshaw and Swaminathan took over paint a bleak picture of workplace mistreatment, pay disparities and serious issues with diversity and inclusion.
“There’s a big chunk of those that came after that dark time,” Johnson said when asked about the Glassdoor postings. “A bunch of people got let go, and it was a rough time for a couple of reasons on the editorial side of things.”
Along with low revenues leading to layoffs, Johnson cites efforts by Grist leadership to push for rapid professionalization and accountability from the staff, who were suddenly being called out for doing the kind of casual, snarky blogging for which they had previously been lauded.
“There were definitely a lot of hurt feelings going into that,” Johnson said.
DePass, who was a board member at the time, declined to comment on specifics, but acknowledged there were serious issues at Grist at the time. Since then, the organization’s board and leadership, including Walkinshaw and Swaminathan, have worked to improve the organization’s inner workings.
“I read all of those Glassdoor reviews,” said Swaminathan. “For me, coming into a position where I would be overseeing people, and especially as I moved into my executive editor position, those reviews have been in the back of my mind in guiding how we nurture talent and how we basically handle ideas being brought to us by the people who work at Grist.”
Walkinshaw’s fundraising prowess has set Grist into more stable financial seas, while he, Swaminathan, Lisa Garcia—head of Grist’s solutions vertical, Fix—and others have also powered forward professionalization and diversity, equity and inclusion measures.
“I think that the organization is in a really strong, positive cultural place right now,” said Walkinshaw.
“Since Brady came on, we’ve been doing a lot of sort of lovey-dovey group therapy sessions with various moderators and stuff,” said Johnson. “And there have been some things that came out about that. It became clear that there were a lot of women in the organization who felt they were getting handed all of the work.”
Because of Grist’s previous “anarchic” structure and editorial process, extra work was often doled out informally, with women either being assigned the bulk of the tasks or feeling the most pressure to step up.
Andrews, who joined Grist in 2014, told Blue Tent that many women on staff were regularly expected to supervise other employees or take on additional writing projects outside of their job descriptions.
“You just didn’t see that ask really going to male employees as much,” said Andrews.
She and Johnson both agreed that the newsroom has made huge strides on these and other problems in recent years, in large part thanks to Grist’s efforts to professionalize editorial policies and give staffers a forum to discuss their concerns.
“I don’t think we’ve seen nearly as much turnover in the last couple of years due to burn out,” said Andrews.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are top priorities, even if that means letting staffers unionize
Every member of Grist’s leadership who spoke with Blue Tent made a point to laud the organization’s progress on diversity, equity and inclusion. While such practices are certainly trendy to talk about in 2020, the diversity at Grist is striking compared to other news organizations, as is the impact this diversity has had on Grist’s coverage.
“I think Grist, in many ways, does stand apart in the environmental news space for creating this really diverse newsroom,” said Sadasivam. “And that comes from the top, honestly.”
Along with hiring a more diverse staff, Grist has worked closely with organizations like the Ida B. Wells Society to fund and publish journalism from a diverse group of freelancers.
“It’s really important to me that we have the right reporters to tell these stories,” said Swaminathan.
In addition to their splashier, investigative longreads, Grist has reliably churned out shorter, quality stories on environmental justice, from interviews of Native American activists to explainers on access to parks for nonwhite communities.
“It’s really great to work for such a diverse team, because you’re not the person in the room who’s thinking ‘oh my god, should I say this?’” said Lisa Garcia. “It’s more like I can just be myself and be honest and everyone is like ‘great point’ or ‘I was gonna raise that’ or ‘actually, we’re already doing that.’ It’s just really wonderful to be with a team like that.”
For many publications, however, this devotion to equity and inclusion stops being a priority when push comes to shove. In recent years, a number of digital newsrooms and nonprofit workers have taken these charges seriously and organized unions, only to be met with cold feet or outright hostility from their seemingly progressive bosses. Grist leadership across the board told Blue Tent that they would not oppose similar efforts among their own staff. Walkinshaw, Swaminathan and Garcia, along with board members DePass and Hu, all signaled their acceptance of a potential Grist union.
“If it’s something that were to happen, I’d be really supportive,” said Walkinshaw.
Rebranding for a “more robust Grist”
Grist’s focus on climate justice and solutions will be a centerpiece for the organization moving into its third decade. They’ve started a new podcast, Temperature Check, and are preparing for a brand relaunch in 2021 with Upstatement, the digital design firm behind publications like Texas Monthly and The 19th. Walkinshaw hopes the relaunch will put all of the team’s hard work on climate justice and solutions front and center. As Roberts pointed out, Grist has gone through rebranding and reimagining plenty of times before. In this instance, Elise Hu expects the changes to stick.
“I always say worry about the product, don’t worry about the brand,” said Hu. “Don’t try to dress up yourself to be something you’re not. And I’m really excited for Grist’s relaunch in early 2021 because [the staff] has done a lot of internal work to be an even more robust Grist, and the new brand relaunch will support that.”
When President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, many progressive groups and news outlets experienced the notorious “Trump bump” in funding from a newly engaged and motivated public. But with Joe Biden less than a month away from taking office on a promise to return the country to normalcy, and as the economy continues to sputter, editors and nonprofit leaders are preparing to tighten their belts. While the future of digital journalism may be in question, Grist has one clear advantage over its contemporaries: its past.
Grist has outlasted more than a few journalistic trends in its 20-plus years of publication, especially the venture capital-backed boom and bust cycles that led so many promising digital newsrooms to expand and then crumble. Being a nonprofit rather than a potential property in an investment portfolio has certainly helped, but so has choosing the right moments to change—or not.
“I always thought it could have been more, if it had figured out what it wanted to do and made up its mind and stuck to a plan earlier on, it could have been bigger,” Roberts said. “But on the other hand, it’s cool to see it just never going away, just plugging along the side and kind of outlasting all these ebbs and flows of public opinion, and all these coming-and-going fads, and all this crazy politics, it’s still there. It’s insane, the success of it.”
