, his free weekly newsletter on the rise of clean energy. *** When your job involves occasionally illustrating the collapse of companies with a stock image of a skull, there’s a risk that, one day, the skull comes for you. That day arrived last month, instantly changing us journalists from the chroniclers of corporate demise to the chronicled. The outpouring from long-time readers got me thinking about what it was about Greentech Media that forged such an emotional bond over such wonky subject matter. From 2007 onward, this publication paid attention to solar, batteries and distributed energy when they were insignificant players in a vast and old-fashioned power industry. Startups that we covered as bootstrapped longshots have since become billion-dollar companies. Others turned billion-dollar valuations into scraps sold off at auction.