ESG Investor, a publication covering sustainable investment, has ceased operations citing political and economic headwinds in the sector it covers.
Co-founder and editor Chris Hall told Press Gazette the title, which launched toward the end of 2020, had been break-even for most of its existence.
But a political backlash against “woke” investment trends, as well as uninspiring returns from ESG investments, had created trading conditions which he said made it difficult to continue.
ESG (environmental, social and governance) is an investment consideration that takes into account the wider effects of investment decisions beyond simply their financial returns.
ESG Investor stopped publishing as of Monday 28 April. It employed nine people according to its masthead and was mostly funded through advertising, adding a paywall around a year ago.
Hall said: “It was really only about maybe nine to 12 months ago, perhaps, we began to think that there were more challenging times ahead for our particular model.”
He said the brand’s “keenest” advertisers had been data and information providers hoping to reach asset managers and owners. Its global audience grew quickly, he said, although “we might have been a bit slower than we perhaps should have been” to launch a paywall. Hall and ESG Investor co-founder Nick Wakefield said in an announcement about the closure that the title had more than 7,000 “strong readers”.
When the paywall did launch uptake “wasn’t as strong as it could have been – it was okay, we got quite a few big asset owners and asset managers, but ultimately there weren’t enough of them who were prepared to go in at the prices that we were asking”.
Asked what had caused the closure, Hall said: “Sustainable investing has clearly hit headwinds from a returns perspective, certainly from the invasion of Ukraine onwards. The price of oil absolutely shot up and made a lot of people who were willing to invest in oil a lot of money, and anyone who was avoiding fossil fuels paid the price from that, from a returns perspective.”
But there was a limit to this, he said: “If one looks over the last couple of years, the difference between sustainable funds’ returns and those traditional funds’ – there’s not a great deal in it.”
He added there had also been “the political context, particularly in the US – whereby obviously there has been a big anti-ESG, anti-’woke capitalism’ etcetera backlash from Republicans, and that’s not just since Trump got back in power, that’s been building for a good couple of years.
“And that’s been both state-level attorneys general but also Congress, in a variety of different ways. They’ve been issuing legal threats to asset managers… since Donald Trump came back into the White House we were very much seeing corporate America very firmly fall in line behind him and his attacks on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion, another corporate responsibility concern], attacks on renewable energy, etcetera.
“And that’s had quite a chilling effect in terms of really discouraging asset managers, in particular, from talking about their sustainable investment capabilities, which continue to exist and continue to be in demand from our core readership of asset owners.
“The asset owners absolutely have not changed their mind at all in terms of wanting to make sure that they take account of the environmental, social and governance risks in their portfolios – quite the reverse. In fact they’re kind of getting tougher.”
Emanuela Hawker, a senior reporter for the site and the first employee on ESG Investor’s payroll, said on LinkedIn “it is undoubtedly a completely different landscape to the one from which ESG Investor first sprouted.
“It’s impossible to deny the long shadow of Trump, or the cautious pragmatism creeping into investors’ sustainable finance strategies.”
In one of the last articles published to the site Hall wrote about a Morningstar Sustainalytics report which had found investors pulled $1.2bn out of sustainable funds in Europe in Q1 2025, the first quarterly outflow since 2018.
There are still other titles covering the ESG beat, Hall told Press Gazette, citing existing pensions and green finance titles as well as reporters at larger publishers like the Financial Times and Bloomberg.
ESG Investor’s sister title, Singapore-based B2B title Regulation Asia, will continue to publish. Hall said Wakfield, who founded Regulation Asia, will continue to play “a big part” running it, and “we’re in discussions about other positions” for staff at ESG Investor.
For his part Hall, a career B2B journalist, said he was “very committed to generating content specifically about sustainable finance, and that’s where my future lies”.
[Read more: Trump’s threat to global media is more wide-ranging than just a trade war]
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