Another eco-journalist leaves Grist

In case you’ve never heard of it, the web magazine “Grist” is  sort of like a Pravda version of the Whole Earth Catalog. They have a staff, a budget, and a swanky downtown office.

Last year it was chief climate attack dog David Roberts leaving whose most famous bit of work was Nuremberg style trials for climate skeptics. His reason was “burnout”. I guess I can see why.

Now, it’s a guy who finally realized his commute of hundreds of miles each week was hypocritcal. Kudos to him for finally waking up. Andrew Revkin writes:

Scott Rosenberg, a pioneering Web journalist and author of “Say Everything,” a history of blogging (if that isn’t an oxymoron), is stepping down after two and a half years leading the blog flow at the green website Grist. In his farewell post, Rosenberg explains that his weekly commutes from his Bay Area home to Seattle weren’t sustainable.

There’s another factor; Grist isn’t growing. In fact when an annoying little blog like this one can beat them in many web metrics, you have to wonder if maybe Rosenberg actually sees the writing on the wall:

Source: Alexa.com Looks like another divergence problem.

As always, lower traffic rank numbers are better, for example, Google is rated as 1. Note the 72% bounce rate and time on site. Mashable notes that:

“On the Internet, a high bounce rate is the kiss of death”

Of course, content might have something to do with it, like today’s featured story on spoons.

You have to wonder how they figure a gas leak explosion is relevant to the “climate and energy” category, unless maybe they just want to blame evil natural gas for the entire problem and be done with it.