FOCUS online launches new climate brand with office in the Ahr Valley
by Johanna Schallehn
FOCUS online is launching a new brand this Wednesday: under the umbrella of FOCUS online Earth, a new team from digital publisher BurdaForward is dedicated to the climate crisis and how to tackle it. For this purpose, FOCUS online is developing its flood office in the Ahr valley into a climate office. From this location, the news portal is building up a large network of experts who share their constructive ideas on the new brand.
The eleven-member BurdaForward climate team is comprehensively dealing with the question of how our society can preserve the foundations of life on earth for future generations.
So far, large parts of climate reporting in the German media have been ideological. It is more about noise and climate glue than constructive approaches to solving a central human problem. With FOCUS online Earth, we want to make our contribution to a broad search for solutions.“
Around 50 renowned guest authors are already members of FOCUS online Earth's rapidly growing network of experts. Among them are climate researchers such as Mojib Latif, President of the German Club of Rome, and Antje Boetius, marine biologist at the University of Bremen. Actor Hannes Jaenicke, who has been campaigning for environmental and animal protection for many years, also supports the network with contributions. The medical doctor Alexander S. Kekulé will also publish articles on the physical consequences of global warming.
The launch of the new brand is being driven by the team from the BurdaForward locations in Munich, Cologne and Berlin. At the same time, the climate office is being set up in the town of Ahrweiler, which was hit hard by the flood of the century in July 2021. The office will be managed by the former FOCUS online reporter Frank Gerstenberg. "To this day, trenches gape like open wounds in the streets in front of the office. The Ahr valley is emblematic of a world that is ecologically out of balance. Humans and nature have fatefully got in each other's way there," says Gerstenberg.
FOCUS online had set up a flood office in 2021 to permanently report on the consequences of the Eifel disaster. With the move to the new office in the Ahr valley, the news portal is developing the flood office into a climate office.
The new team will pay more attention to solutions offered by technology and science when setting the topics.
Sustainable building and settlement, disaster-proof and self-sufficient energy supply, soft tourism - nowhere is the successful coexistence of humans and the environment currently being thought about more intensively than there.“
The new brand "FOCUS online Earth" will be firmly and prominently integrated into all important start pages of FOCUS online at the web address www.focus.de/earth. In addition, the other portals of the Munich-based digital company BurdaForward, such as CHIP.de, Bunte.de and the stock market site Finanzen 100, will include the climate office on their portals.
Learn more about FOCUS online Earth:
Johanna Schallehn
BurdaForward Communications
For more than eight years I have been writing texts about our company and our brands, organising trade fairs, talking to journalists and being chronically in far too many meetings. Whether at home or in the office - it doesn't get boring and sometimes I just put out the fire. If not, then I am most likely to be met in the mountains, with my daughter on the Isar or in my home country and the most beautiful city in the world: Hamburg.