Top news organisations will collaborate to publish a series of articles on how American businesses are responding to liabilities, risks and opportunities surrounding climate change, Foliomag reports. The Atlantic, Mother Jones and Wired, along with Slate, Grist, the Center for Investigative Reporting and PBS current-affairs program "Need to Know" have teamed up to launch Climate Desk, a project dedicated to exploring climate change issues.

This collaboration represents an important step towards resolving the difficulty of covering expansive topics under dwindling resources. Climate Desk hopes to reach a combined online audience of more than 25 million monthly unique visitors, 1.5 million print readers and an expected TV audience of 1.5 viewers.

The Atlantic editorial director Bob Cohn told Folio in an interview that "Pooling resources, whether it's money or reporters or technology, can make good sense for outfits that want to remain ambitious in lean times. We all still want to beat the other guy, but sometimes the best way to unpack a complex and multi-dimensional story may be to forge ties with like-minded colleagues."

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Clara Jeffrey and Monika Bauerlein, co-editors of Mother Jones, the issue of climate change is the "perfect lab" for testing this wide-scale partnership model, because of its "vast and complex" nature which requires different but complementary areas of expertise.

"You start to imagine the different skill sets and how they can partner up to make something that's bigger than the sum of its parts," said Jeffrey.

The partner organisations cover their own costs for the pieces that they contribute to the project, but for the joint assignments and for maintaining the Climate Desk Web site, the project has received funding from the Surdna Foundation and the Park Foundation.