One year of Latitude Media 

OCTOBER 18, 2024

One year ago, we launched Latitude Media. 

The premise behind Latitude Media was simple: carve a space for B2B coverage of the deals, technologies, and markets that are driving the commercial frontiers of clean energy and climate tech. 

Over the last year, we’ve questioned the hyped-up tech backed by Sam Altman, dissected failures in the carbon removal and storage space, heard anxiety in the green hydrogen market, examined the divide in the tech industry over how to build clean energy, and recorded more than a dozen interviews at the DNC and RNC.

We also took artificial intelligence very seriously as a foundational coverage area — with lots of rational coverage, a conference series, and detailed research on the state of AI adoption in the power sector. This set us up to cover the nuances of the surge in electricity demand from data centers, months before it became a big story. (Make sure to read our new newsletter on the topic, AI-Energy Nexus.)

Before launching Latitude Media last year, many of you knew us as a production company making podcasts about the energy transition. And even as our work expands, audio remains a core part of what we do.

Our original podcasts — including our flagship shows Catalyst with Shayle Kann and The Carbon Copy — have brought in 2.5 million downloads. Earlier this year, I stepped back from making The Carbon Copy, and we’re set to launch a new show in November, hosted by Lara Pierpoint, that will profile the people and companies building first-of-a-kind projects.

We also make lots of podcasts with our partners, such as Political Climate, The Big Switch, Columbia Energy Exchange, With Great Power, and Where the Internet Lives.

I started reporting on the clean energy market in 2006, when solar PV and wind were just beginning to achieve liftoff. It was immediately clear that the energy transition would be a generation-defining business story — or, as my former Energy Gang co-host Jigar Shah put it: “the largest wealth creation opportunity on the planet.”

My Latitude Media co-founder, Scott Clavenna, saw the early signs as well. He co-founded Greentech Media in 2007, which went on to become the defining B2B media and research voice for the budding clean energy industry.

In those early days, most other media outlets treated renewables and other forms of clean energy as an “alternative” curiosity. The scale and complexity of the industry have changed radically in the years since — and so has the media environment. 

With nearly $3 trillion headed into clean energy annually, investment now eclipses that of fossil fuels. As the industry grew, we witnessed hundreds of bankruptcies, multiple market corrections, political extremes, a widening roster of investors, and new classes of promising technologies. And today, there are many high-quality outlets taking the energy transition seriously. 

But we saw an opportunity to bring journalism, events, research, and our production team together for a new B2B media brand. We started Latitude Media as a guide to the energy transition for the people who are shaping it: the entrepreneurs, investors, and companies looking to understand what is working — and what is not working — in today’s market. 

As we evolve over the coming year, we will continue to dig into the markets, business models, and technology trends at the commercial frontiers of clean energy.

On behalf of our team, we want to thank you for being a reader, a listener, or an attendee at one of our events. Please drop us a line to editors@latitudemedia.com if you want to provide story ideas or feedback — we highly value your input.

Sincerely,

Stephen Lacey