“Something they can talk about with their board”: Reflections on Skylight in print

At the start of this year, faced with the chal­lenge of meeting readers where they are doing the work of decar­boniza­tion — in their own homes — the Skylight team decided to pound the pavement. 

In February, the team printed and distrib­uted copies of its debut tabloid — a four-page spread of existing Skylight stories, arranged in a tradi­tional news­paper layout to offer readers a compre­hen­sive overview not only of Skylight’s reporting, but the New York City building energy tran­si­tion in progress. 

Skylight staff and friends then spent the next few months distrib­uting the tabloid to build­ings all across New York City. Ever since, Skylight Publisher Eric Lee has had many ​“star­tling” encoun­ters with New Yorkers who recog­nized Skylight from the print they received in their building’s mail room. 

In one encounter, Lee was handing out tabloid copies at a Jackson Heights farmers market over the summer when he met a woman who already recog­nized Skylight; she’d received a copy of the tabloid in her building.

“We printed 2,500 copies, so in a city of eight and a half million people, you wouldn’t neces­sarily imagine bumping into some­body who got the print edition. But that has happened several times,” Lee recalled. ​“It’s been pretty gratifying.”

The idea for the tabloid was initially conceived out of a need to increase aware­ness of Skylight as a publi­ca­tion in its infancy. But unlike other new media, Skylight’s specific mission covering New York City means it can’t just rely on an online viral moment to gain readership.

Stefanie Lew and Joseph Cho are prin­ci­pals at Binocular Design, which designed the Skylight website. They initially proposed the idea of a printed tabloid to Lee and former program director Hannah Berman as a tangible ​“sampler of arti­cles from various editions” Skylight has published online, Lew said. 

“We tried to imagine what Skylight would be like if this were the pre-website days, much like you would have a small news­paper or a tabloid on the news on the subway,” Cho added. 

The Skylight team worked with Lew and Cho to design a print that not only ​“show­cased the best of Skylight” but was also ​“easily acces­sible from the outsider’s perspec­tive,” Berman said. When choosing the tabloid’s content, the team reread all of Skylight’s arti­cles from the perspec­tive of someone unfa­miliar with the diffi­cult work of building decarbonization. 

Berman, who shep­herded the project, said she found the task of making Skylight ​“legible as an entity to people who don’t under­stand what we are,” to be a ​“really inter­esting and cool intel­lec­tual challenge.” 

After under­going many iter­a­tions, Skylight finally put the tabloid to print and first mailed a portion of its 2,500 copies to several allied nonprofit orga­ni­za­tions, city council members, and friends working in indus­tries concerned with building decar­boniza­tion, according to Lee. 

Next came the biggest distri­b­u­tion effort; going door-to-door handing out copies in person to rele­vant apart­ment build­ings across New York City. For this project, Berman worked with Skylight consul­tant Jaime Stock to down­load and analyze public data of co-op and condo loca­tions across the city. Equipped with this data, the Skylight team chose to visit co-ops in densely popu­lated neighborhoods. 

“The task was to go off into the world with a whole stack of printed editions, and knock on doors…and leave about five printed editions at every building you go to, in the hopes that co-op board members…would be able to grab a copy and engage with the content,” Berman said. 

At times the door-to-door distri­b­u­tion was chal­lenging. ​“Getting these flyers to the right people requires you to go through gate­keepers or to gain access to a phys­ical building,” Stock said. ​“Not every­body wants to take stuff (and) not every­body wants to put stuff out. But most people were pretty excited about it and open to it at the minimum.”

These in-person distri­b­u­tion chal­lenges mirror the ones faced by New Yorkers seeking to reno­vate their build­ings, Stock added: It’s diffi­cult for build­ings looking to undergo energy upgrades to find the right people to assist with the project. And even if you are the qual­i­fied person, it’s hard to connect with everyone else you need to work with to ​“make stuff happen.” 

Still, the Skylight team found the distri­b­u­tion a mainly rewarding experience. 

Stock found going door-to-door on the Upper West Side ​“really fun” because she encoun­tered ​“really nice, lovely doormen who were excited to chat and happy to tell me they would find the head of the co-op board and make sure they saw it.” 

For Lee, the ​“most striking” part of his distri­b­u­tion expe­ri­ence was in the East Bronx, where he saw ​“a wide range of kinds of apart­ments in one neighborhood.” 

“There are a lot of stereo­types about the clean energy tran­si­tion and who’s inter­ested in them,” Lee said. But when conversing with New Yorkers from all ​“kinds of different circum­stances,” across the city, Lee found that they responded to Skylight with a common ​“open­ness” to solu­tions in the build­ings of fellow New Yorkers. 

Ultimately, Skylight’s team members found the debut tabloid project so successful, that they plan to release future printed editions, Lee says. 

Those who received the tabloid also largely found it to be a useful tool. 

“I love the maps showing where projects are and the succinct ways of capturing other stories — empha­sizing its people that do this work,” Judith Boroschek, a climate orga­nizer with Mothers Out Front, who received one of the tabloids by mail, wrote in an email to Skylight. ​“Overall [Skylight] really show[s] how decar­bonizing is do-able.”

Two core tenets of Skylight’s mission are making the work to lower building carbon emis­sions visible, and providing an infor­ma­tional roadmap for New Yorkers to follow the example of their neigh­bors, Lee explained. He says the in-person distri­b­u­tion project ​“substan­tially advanced” these goals. 

“The problem is visi­bility, and so you don’t just want to make it visible [digi­tally] — you want to make it visible in an embodied sense.” Lee said. ​“You want to meet people, show them that you’re doing the work, as are other people who are repre­sented in a publication.You want to show them you’re present where they live.” 

“Skylight is founded with the theory that people need to feel less alone in this struggle,” Berman said. ​“From talking to a lot of different people in this situ­a­tion, a lot of them feel really alone, and so part of (the reason why we are) going in person and giving them some­thing that they can talk about with their board…is we want to build this commu­nity of people who believe in the mission of decar­bonizing New York City.”