Dot Earth

» see dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The New York Times gave Andrew Revkin a blog in October 2007 and he used it for nine years to do the thing newspapers are worst at: think out loud in public over years, and change his mind where the evidence moved. The first post went up on 25 October and was about prize money for cutting greenhouse gases. The subject, as he framed it, was the gap between what people want and what the planet can carry, and the beat ran from energy policy to biodiversity, widening to whatever a reader had pushed at him that week.

It was one of the first newspaper blogs treated as a reporting instrument rather than a marketing device. Revkin ran interviews and long comment threads he actually read, and a Pace University release claimed readers in over 200 countries. He was a working Times reporter when he started, which is why the first 940 posts sit on the news side of the paper's website.

In April 2010 the blog moved to Opinion. The reason was Revkin's own status: he had left the Times staff at the end of 2009 and was writing as a freelancer, and the paper wanted the line between reporting and commentary drawn somewhere a reader could see it. The Columbia Journalism Review covered the move at the time. Dot Earth kept its name and its audience, and its archive is now split across two sections of nytimes.com because of it.

He ended it on 5 December 2016, the morning he started as a senior reporter at ProPublica. "This is the 2,810th and final post in the nine-year inquiry I began here while still a Times news reporter on October 24, 2007", he wrote. The date is wrong by a day. His own first post carries a timestamp of 25 October 2007 at 11:20 in the morning.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the view from here ~

Climate blogging in English in 2007 was a conversation I could read and had no way into. I was 23, on TTNet broadband in Ankara, and the environmental argument that reached Turkish newspapers then was about the Bosphorus and about dams, not about carbon budgets. Dot Earth is one of the things I found late and read in reverse, which is the normal way to meet a nine-year archive.

~ the final count ~

2,810 posts across nine years works out at about six a week, sustained, including the seven years he did it as a freelancer alongside teaching and documentary filming at Pace University. The number mattered enough to him that he put it in the title of his own farewell.

Revkin gave his reason plainly. He was moving back to in-depth journalism after 33 years on the environment beat, and what he wanted was depth rather than a daily surface. ProPublica was the destination, and the timing was exact: the farewell went up the same morning the new job started.

~ it is still there ~

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com does not resolve to anything live. It issues a permanent redirect to archive.nytimes.com, where the whole blog is served as a static capsule: the posts and the photographs, with the comment counts still printed beside them. The farewell post comes back as 55 KB of readable HTML in 2026.

That is rarer than it sounds. The New York Times retired blogs as a format around 2016 and 2017, dozens of them at once, and chose to keep them readable at fixed addresses instead of deleting them or bouncing every old link to a topic page. Most of the graves on this site exist because somebody found it cheaper to switch a host off.

So Dot Earth is dead the way a newspaper column is dead. Nobody is writing it, and every word of it is still exactly where it was.

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