HS’s Petja Pelli receives Suomen Kuvalehti’s award for ambitious environmental journalism

Helsinki News reporter Petja Pelli has received Suomen Kuvalehti’s journalism award. The award is given to Pelli for his “quality and ambitious journalism on environmental issues”.

According to the justification of the award committee, Pelli “familiarizes himself with the subject, stalks the news like a political reporter and goes to the scene like a correspondent”. He is praised for his ability to look at his subjects from many directions, the language of the stories and the use of different narrative methods.

“Environmental journalism it has to be done at least as seriously as economic or political scoop journalism,” says Pelli (b. 1985). He works in HS’s policy department, his area of ​​responsibility is climate and environmental policy.

Pelli has worked at Helsingin Sanomat since 2008, also in executive positions. For the longest time, he has worked in foreign affairs, where he was also Stockholm’s correspondent from 2017 to 2020.

In Pell’s opinion, journalism must recognize that environmental destruction and loss of nature affect everything. “It is the hard content of politics and economics. It affects our health. In culture, it affects the story we tell about ourselves.”

Climate and environmental issues divide people’s opinions, feelings and also the field of politics.

According to Pelli, the essential thing in journalism is to face all the difficulties related to the topic. He reminds us that facts such as the carbon dioxide content of the air or the decline in the bird population cannot be questioned.

“We do journalism for adults, and no message needs to be sugarcoated,” he says.

“In news journalism, you cannot take as a criterion how it makes people feel.”

He does not subscribe to the claim that writing from an environmental perspective is activism journalism.

One balancing factor is that, in Pell’s opinion, a journalist should also face the people who have to make the required changes.

“It is quite often the owner of the forest, a forest machine driver or a farmer. If this meeting is not done, it can lead to the feeling that this is somehow crooked.”

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“Since then, it has seemed amusing when a politician talks about climate change as a matter of the future.”

On the spot going is important, especially if the topic is “abstract or overwhelming”, such as the loss of nature or global warming.

For example, it was initially difficult to find anyone who wanted to talk about the brutal destruction of Suomussalmi.

“The correspondent experience helped. I trusted that when I got there, things would be sorted out.”

He drove several hundreds of kilometers in a rental car and got to talk with the locals and a representative of Metsähallitus on the raakkujoki.

“It’s easy to have caricatures in your mind, but reality is always more complicated.”

In the fishing village In Greenland, Pelli saw the icebergs melting. In India, he visited a village that was becoming unlivable, where it had been over 40 degrees for more than three months.

“Since then, it has seemed even more incomprehensible when a politician talks about climate change only as a matter of the future.”

Suomen Kuvalehti’s prize has been awarded since 1975 for impressive journalistic activity or for writings, pictures or programs in the media dealing with significant national or social issues. The prize of 10,000 euros is shared by Suomen Kuvalehti and the Otava Book Foundation.