We hope you like our new look. We've streamlined our site and given you some important new tools.
We overhauled our site to better reach you – and readers who don't even know us yet. We want to be where you find and consume news. Increasingly, that's on a phone or tablet, and our new site is tailor-made for mobile.
After all, who among us hasn't stumbled upon a news story this week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat? Our new platform helps you push information you find noteworthy out to your circle of friends and family.
Even better, we're far more nimble – thanks to our partners at RebelMouse, the New York-based tech firm powering the new EHN.org. We can easily react to and report on important developments in environmental health.
I like to think we're all the beneficiaries of this. We have a small crew doing this work, but together we have well over a century's worth of experience in environmental health journalism and science.
It's time for us to get loud. We promise to keep bringing you journalism that drives the discussion on our environment and health. Thanks for reading us.
If you're missing the old site – change is hard – let me give you three quick reasons why we had to move:
1.Web traffic is going mobile
Sometime in the past four years, depending on the source, the phone became the dominant way people accessed the Internet. In August, mobile devices accounted for almost 53 percent of web page views globally, according to StatCounter, a web analytics service.
And that doesn't count tablets.
In Asia, two out of three people accessing the Internet are using a phone; in Africa, 64 percent are.
Remember the days when you needed 10 minutes to enlarge and read a PDF on your phone? Now desktop is an afterthought in today's website design.
2.Facebook is your new hometown paper
As of August, two-thirds of Americans said they got at least some of their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center. Almost four out of five adults between the ages of 18 and 49 get their news that way.
Facebook is the behemoth, with about half of all U.S. adults finding news there. But Snapchat is growing fast. I teach a climate policy class at Montana State University; last semester I noticed none of my students on Twitter or Facebook. "Why?" I asked. "Too many words!" came the reply.
Roll your eyes if you must. I'm excited to bring our voice to these conversations.
3.We're changing journalism
Think for a moment about back surgery.
Fifteen years ago, treating a slipped disk required a two-inch incision and a week's stay in the hospital. A surgeon doing that today would be charged with malpractice.
Journalism is changing just as radically.
We've been delivering kick-ass reporting since 2008. We'll still give you the in-depth pieces that have won international praise – most recently the Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting for "Sacred Water," Senior Editor Brian Bienkowski's investigation of water and inequity in Indian Country.
(Coming next month: "Peak Pig," a deep dive, with media partner NC Policy Watch, into hog farming and fight for the soul of rural America.)
But we'll also be out with Facebook Instant Articles and quick synopses of important trends of the day. We want to be more proactive. We're going to drive the discussion.
