Sentient Media
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Sentient Media is a non-profit organization focused on increasing public awareness about the problems surrounding factory farming. The organization views itself as a media company who is working to “change the narrative” around animal agriculture[1]. Sentient Media’ strategy broadly has two pillars: helping existing animal rights raise their digital profile and helping journalists better cover factory farming stories and make the connection between factory farming and other social causes (e.g. climate change) that the journalists already cover extensively.
History
Sentient Media was founded in 2017 by Mikko Jarvenpaa. Javernpaa started his career as a product manager at Google and later went on to become CEO of Infogram, a company he helped sell to Prezi in 2017[2]. Javernpaa served as the Executive Director of Sentient Media from its founding through early 2020, when Ana Bradley, who joined Sentient Media as a digital content strategist in 2019[3], took over the role.
Philosophy and Activism
Mission
The organization is called Sentient Media because Jarvenpaa wanted sentience to be a focal point of the work. The logic is that sentience, the ability to feel or perceive things, is closely linked with the ability to experience pain. Since an animals’ ability to suffer and desire to avoid pain can be clearly measured and almost all ethical systems agree that, all things equal, suffering should be avoided, Jarvenpaa thought this would be a broadly supported way to frame the issues for which the organization is advocating.
The organization’s goal is to make the topic of animal rights more salient in the public discourse. While Sentient Media’s starting point is focusing on the suffering of the nearly 10 billion land animals that are bread into a painful, limited existing and slaughtered every year, the organization is also focused on the myriad negative externalities involved in factory farming including human health, poor industry working conditions, and climate change.
Link to climate change
Climate change in particular has been a big focus of the organization. Although factory farming is one of the major contributors to global warming (meat and dairy production drive about 16.5% of GHG emissions[4]), Sentient Media believes the link between factory farming and global warming is broadly not well understood and too often overlooked in the media. In May of 2023, Sentient Media and Faunalytics jointly published a study that analyzed thousands of articles on climate change[5] and found that only 7% of them mentioned animal agriculture and rarely discussed the impact of climate change[6].
To help improve the media coverage of Factory Farming, Sentient Media launched the Food & Farming Media Network in June 2023. The Food & Farming Media Network provides journalist members with freelance reporting resources, self-guided courses, and a bi-weekly newsletter with article topic pitching opportunities. To help journalists specifically better make the connection between factory farming and climate change, Sentient Media created the Food and Farming Climate Media toolkit, which includes a number of articles and reports outlining the linkage.
Helping other animal rights organizations
In addition to helping journalists better write articles that address the problems of Factory Farming and associated negative externalities, Sentient Media also directly helps other animal rights organizations boost their digital presence. In 2021, for example, Sentiment took on The Humane League, Nutrition Facts, Mercy for Animals, and the Factor Farming Awareness Coalition as digital service partners[7]. Sentient Media helps these organizations grow their online presence by providing training, strategy, and content to boost their position in search results.
References
- ↑ "Mission | Sentient Media". Retrieved 2023-10-17.
- ↑ "Expanding, Hungarian Tech Company Prezi Acquires Latvian Start-up Infogram". Hungary Today. 2017-05-16. Retrieved 2023-10-17.
- ↑ Media, Sentient (2020-01-16). "2019 Year in Review: Informing, Inspiring, and Empowering the Farmed Animal Movement". Retrieved 2023-10-17.
- ↑ Twine, Richard (28 May 2021). "Emissions from Animal Agriculture—16.5% Is the New Minimum Figure". Sustainability. 13 (11): 6276. doi:10.3390/su13116276. ISSN 2071-1050.
- ↑ Torrella, Kenny (2023-07-01). "Why the media too often ignores the connection between climate change and meat". Vox. Retrieved 2023-10-17.
- ↑ "New Report Reveals Only 7 Percent of Climate Media Mentions Animal Agriculture". VEGWORLD Magazine. 2023-06-02. Retrieved 2023-10-17.
- ↑ Media, Sentient (2021-12-17). "Sentient Media 2021 Year in Review: Wins, Losses, and the Road Ahead". Retrieved 2023-10-17.
External links
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