The Camden New Journal and Islington Tribune were organisers of the LDN COP

THERE was a time, a decade or so ago, when hopeful reporters had little chance of stirring their editors with stories about three things: housing, mental health and climate change.

Pitches went mouldy in the “maybe” tray in Fleet Street.

It was perhaps only when London’s housing crisis widened to sting the newspaper editors and executives’ own children that debates over affordable homes really moved up the media’s agenda.

Why couldn’t they afford to get a starter property in a place like Kentish Town like used to happen 40 years ago?

Mental health got taken more seriously when people finally started talking about it without stigma, and the world realised it’s something that affects nearly everyone in some way.

And then there was climate change – limited in the past to stories about avoiding CFCs in hairspray and lonely polar bears.

Twenty years ago, I pitched a story to a national news editor about the dangerous levels of pollution in London’s air, and figures which campaigners were trying to publicise in order to effect change.

There was little appetite for an article, but thankfully the mood is changing.

Now it’s something that’s talked about almost every week and that tired line that “we never moaned about choking in the 80s and it was just as bad then” is no longer clicking.

As more people realise the threat of climate change, it has slowly crept up the news agenda.

Not enough to topple the Beckham feud perhaps, but we are getting there.

And as ever the New Journal will be at the forefront of reporting on this issue that affects us all – and links back to so many other ills here and around the world.

So welcome, from the New Journal, the newspaper which brought you the London COP, to our annual eight-page supplement on the environment.

Thank you to the sponsors who have helped us include these extra pages to tell the story of what’s happening in north London.

Together, we can force it up the news agenda, together we can make a change.