How ‘Digital-born’ media cover climate change in comparison to legacy media: A case study of the COP 21 summit in Paris

•‘Digital-born’ media organisations, like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Vice, are often consulted for news about the environment.•A study of the Paris climate summit shows a considerable overlap in coverage, but also some differences between the new players and legacy media.•Whereas Huffington Post emerges as closer to the theme profile of legacy media in our sample, this is not the case for Vice and BuzzFeed in some areas.•Vice and BuzzFeed pay less attention to the details of the negotiations. Vice gave considerably more coverage to the civil protests.•BuzzFeed and Vice, with less content, are a qualitatively different addition to climate change coverage which reaches new segments of the public. Climate change is often seen as a remote, complex or ‘unobtrusive’ topic by the general public – a topic about which many people acquire information mainly from media reporting. However, media landscapes are changing rapidly, particularly with the growth of the internet and social media. A number of new media organisations are challenging traditional media and have gained significant audiences for their environment content. We analyse the coverage by three of these – Huffington Post, Vice and BuzzFeed – of the COP21 summit in Paris at the end of 2015, and compare it with that of traditional media. We show that while the general spectrum of themes is similar across media outlets, there are differences in the volume of the coverage and in the emphasis that is laid on different themes by some, but not all, of the new players compared to traditional media.