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The Brazilian state of Paraná hosts the largest remaining stretch of the critically endangered Atlantic Forest, or Nhe’ẽry, in the original Guarani language, where multiple environmental threats render coastal residents as especially vulnerable. Mainstream Brazilian environmental journalism has been described as superficial, lacking in source diversity, and as a violent field where specialized training is scarce. I draw from Hall’s (1990) Encoding/Decoding model, Cantrill and Senecah’s (2001) concept of sense of self-in-place, and Zelizer’s (1993) interpretive communities framework to investigate the production and consumption of environmental journalism in the Paraná coast. The reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) of 569 pages of data–including the transcripts of 33 in-depth interviews with local journalists and residents, relevant documents, memos, and fieldnotes from newsroom and community observation–rendered three themes and ten subthemes related to encoding, decoding, and possible futures. All journalists expressed a great deal of care for the environmental beat and are often frustrated with place-based, structural, and editorial limitations that impede them from producing the coverage they aim for. Community members are often portrayed as only hosts, victims, and villains of their own environmental stories, within a coverage that generally falls into a tourism or tragedy binary and conforms with a colonial narrative that undermines the socioenvironmental power of these communities and alienates them from relevant environmental matters. Community members’ complex and, at times, paradoxical relationships with place were central to their decoding processes. Most had overwhelmingly positive experiences with journalists and were eager to build better relationships with local media, as they were optimistic about the transformative power of a more critical and representative coverage that they envision as place-based, solutions- oriented, and that emphasizes positive examples of pro-environmental behavior. I argue that the “self- in-place” must be considered as a defining variable in investigations of encoding and decoding processes, and I offer place-based recommendations on how local communicators can achieve the coverage they desire. Findings are being used in the co- creation of a culturally situated environmental journalism guide, in collaboration with a community advisory board, which will be available for free to local media-makers.
