About Drilled
Climate accountability — investigating and understanding the various drivers of delay on climate action — is critical to understanding and addressing climate change. Drilled is an independent news outlet focused on climate accountability.
The Drilled podcast, launched in 2017, now has an audience of more than one million listeners worldwide, and is consistently among the top 100 science podcasts. Drilled has earned rave reviews from The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and received a 2019 “Excellence in Digital Storytelling” award from the Online News Association, as well as the 2021 Covering Climate Now award for audio. Ian Frazier even gave the podcast a shoutout in the December 2020 edition of his annual holiday poem in The New Yorker.
The Drilled News website launched in January 2020. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Drilled News Climate and COVID-19 Policy Tracker documented dozens of climate change-related rollbacks and industry favors doled out by the Trump administration. The New Republic, The New Yorker, Vox and others picked up the tracker in their ongoing coronavirus coverage. We have since folded the website into this newsletter.
Critical Frequency Drilled is part of the Critical Frequency podcast network, which was started by Drilled's executive producer & lead reporter, investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt. Critical Frequency is a women-run podcast network that has consistently turned out chart-topping, award-winning reported narrative shows. Named AdWeek’s 2019 Podcast Network of the Year, Critical Frequency was founded in 2017 and has produced a total of 24 shows, including productions for Crooked Media and Stitcher’s Witness Docs. Our shows have received a wide range of awards, as well as praise in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and more.
Amy Westervelt is an independent investigative climate journalist who has been on the climate beat for more than 20 years, reporting for a wide range of outlets over the years, including Inside Climate News, The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, NPR, and many more. Despite her move into audio in the past 10 years, Amy still reports and writes regularly for a wide range of publications. You can keep up with her work by following Amy on Mastodon or Twitter as well.
If you would like to syndicate our reporting, or collaborate on a reporting project, please get in touch!
Drilled is a proud member of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
Our reporting process
We independently report every story we publish and do our best to report accurately, fairly, and truthfully, wherever the facts lead. But we don’t believe that “objective” means toothless, or necessitates false equivalence.
If we have documentation of malfeasance, we say so. For too many years the notion of objectivity in journalism has been used as a cudgel to scare off investigative reporters, and to imbue the status quo with a value it doesn’t necessarily deserve. We strive to hold the powerful accountable across industries and across the political spectrum by following the story.
When corrections and clarifications come to our attention, we will update articles and podcast episodes accordingly, note the correction, and make any needed changes to headlines, summaries, and social media.
If you spot inaccuracies in our reporting, please let us know: amy [at] drillednews.com.
Funding
Grants: Drilled News received early funding from the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Thank you to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Fossil Free Media for providing launch support for Drilled Local. The FILE Foundation provided seed funding for Damages. If your organization would like to talk about supporting local and regional climate accountability journalism, please get in touch.
We are actively seeking additional funding. As additional organizations provide funding for Drilled News, we will update this list.
Advertising: Our advertising is handled by Spreaker (contact Maria Carrillo maria.carrillo@spreaker.com with inquiries). Recent podcast advertisers include: Better Health, Climate One, Askov Finlayson, Prudential Insurance, and Wondery.
Subscribers: We also receive funding directly from readers via paid subscriptions on this site and the Drilled News Patreon.