Welcome back to In the Tank, where we talk to leaders in journalism, marketing, and PR about their careers and trending topics within their industries. In this edition we welcome Alan Neuhauser, a reporter with Axios covering climate deals. He joins us to discuss how current political headwinds may impact the climate industry (and media coverage), trends within the vertical, and how he prefers to work with PR professionals.
You’ve spent the last four years covering climate tech and all the deals and investments in the sector, where do you see it going over these next few months and, long-term, years? And what stories are going to be the most important to tell over that time period?
I think we’re seeing a real wake up call or a moment of reckoning for both climate founders and for climate focused investors. Even before the results of the election, we saw both funders and founders realizing how hard it is to exit and how hard it is for investors to get the venture style 10x returns that they need to make their venture capital funds work and function. And for the founders, how to actually get to a point where they’re operating profitably in a commercial market or if not, at least have a clear pathway to doing so. A lot of the technology in the climate space works, but it’s been much harder to get it to be cost competitive with conventionals or incumbents or to just build the production plants that they need to achieve scale. I think right now before we even get to the matter of the election, we see a lot of hard questions being asked, so that’s sort of a big macro question.
One other question is given those concerns and constraints, what types of investors will continue to be willing to do this kind of investing? How many venture firms will keep raising funds and have the ability to draw investors and draw LPs? Will they even be able to get LPs as there’s been this backlash around ESG-focused investing? Will private equity and infrastructure firms actually step up given that the enthusiasm of 2020 to 2022 is no longer around?
The other trend now overhanging all of this of course is Trump. I’m gonna go out on a bit of a limb here and say certainly there will be sectors that are gonna be affected by this change in administration but I do think the folks that were saying that businesses were going to fail under this regime due to changes in policy would’ve failed anyway, but they’ll just fail a little bit faster than they did before. That perspective resonates but I think there will sort of be that gray zone of companies that are maybe on the margin or close to it where they may be more impacted than others, but the latest manifestation of that trend is what happens now given the headwinds and that we’ve got Trump and his presumed policy changes.
With the change in administration, are you going to be paying more attention and writing stories about some of those companies that may fail or the ones that might be resilient? And do you think those are important stories to tell over the next few years?
Yes, our (Axios Pro Climate Tech Deals) lodestar is to be the go to source, as much as possible, of what the hell is happening in climate tech investment day in and day out. The key part of that story is who is managing to figure it out and what are they doing to figure it out, like how are they doing that and who’s not. Whenever we write or learn about a company that’s failing, it’s not because it’s a gossip focused story that will say “look these guys went under.” It’s more about what does their failure tell us? What does that tell our readers? What valuable information does it give to others who may be in the sector or considering it, or about climate tech more broadly?
We saw so much talk about new ways and new platforms to consume media and we saw both candidates go on podcasts and were showcased in a new light. Axios has always been a pioneer in brevity and short story format and making that style in the media popular but what do you see next? What is your team looking towards next? Is it more podcasts?
I think sort of generally it is not just Axios, the podcast boom is over and it has been over for a little bit, but that doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity there but it’s certainly a lot harder. I think for us we always ask where do our readers engage and so for Axios Pro in particular and probably more generally too, people are very enthusiastic about events. When we host events, folks are fired up when we meet them so I think you can expect to see more of that. Beyond that, ‘Smart Brevity,’ both those words resonate. Brevity is needed in a saturated and fragmented media environment, but also smart stories are needed. What do we do to make our reader smarter? What can we do to engage that base and value additive and therefore make it worth our time to do it too because then our readers would care about it. It is a constant conversation internally to determine how we best serve our readers beyond just the newsletter or the stories we are doing online.
What is your favorite story you worked on this past year? If you have one that may have gained attention and went viral that maybe you thought wouldn’t?
I have two answers to that. The macro answer is everyone’s watching what’s happening with demand growth in the electricity sector, so those stories do well, whether it’s AI or new power sources. Then we had two stories on nuclear developers, one that wants to dig deep holes in the ground and put reactors underground. Another was one that wants to put reactors underwater, both as ways to maintain safety while also finding ways to efficiently build these expensive things. Those both got a lot of attention because when you put “underwater nuclear reactor” in a headline and that does well.
But we also did a deep dive into what folks are calling the defense and climate overlap or sort of the more boring term for it is “dual use technology”. We’ve seen a lot of investors and a lot of founders realize that the pentagon is willing to pay for stuff that was previously seen only as green. Electric vehicles that are really silent, you can imagine a military application for sneaky, silent vehicles. Extrapolate that to drones, resilient onsite power.
So we wrote about a venture firm called Caelum that’s raising a fund specifically for national security and climate startups. We took a deep dive into the startups that are navigating this, the investors, what’s changed and why the Pentagon cares about this stuff and why investors care too, so that was fun to do. As funding has dried up, the Department Of Defense has been the one ongoing source of consistent contract opportunities.
Lastly Alan, what is your preferred way to work with PR professionals? What’s the best way we could be of value to you and your team and how we can better work with journalists
Everyone’s different! It’s always subjective but for me because the volume of incoming emails I receive is insane, there’s no such thing as too many emails. So what I tell anyone that I work with in this sector, especially if they focus on climate tech, is keep reaching out if you don’t hear from me. Because that’s helpful to me, it helps me stay on top of my inbox amidst everything else.
Once we have a relationship, I welcome text messages, phone calls, not cold calls but like folks who I have a relationship with and once we actually got to know each other.
And then just like anything else, is being aware of what the beat is! Everyone’s busy, it could be hard to know, but having an awareness of the stuff we’re looking for and that kind of thing is always appreciated.
Yeah, for sure and I think something I always like to do is even acknowledge it, like I know this might not be the perfect fit for you, but I feel like someone maybe at Axios would cover it.
I always appreciate that stuff because there’s always gonna be surprises right? I would say we know when some company announces a new product, normally we won’t write about that. That’s a little incremental for our readers but occasionally it’s surprising enough, it’s like “they want to do what with what?” that we will write about, so it’s always worth trying. You know those occasional emails I get where you know I cover energy and I get a pitch about an energy drink, that’s not me, but that thankfully doesn’t happen too often.
To keep up with Alan Neuhauser, follow him on Bluesky, LinkedIn, or check out his byline at Axios.
Interested in sharing your insights in journalism, marketing, public relations or communications in a future installment of In the Tank? Drop us a line.
