Geospatial Analysis of Wildfire Coverage in Newspapers across the USA

Abstract:

Media coverage of natural disasters can provide an assessment of how humans perceive natural resource issues and threats. This study evaluates a corpus of 1.8 million newspaper articles from 1997-2017 downloaded from LexisNexis for stories focused on wildfire. Our goal is to understand what makes for a newsworthy fire event by looking at characteristics of an individual fire, fire history of the area, demographic and readership data, and the number of articles and length of media coverage. Using geospatial analyses, we highlight the geographical reach of different newspaper sources by mapping locations mentioned in articles using geoparsing. We ran spatial autocorrelation on fire size and frequency data from the National Interagency Fire Center and Federal Emergency Management Agency databases to determine where clusters of fire activity occur and if there is a corresponding pattern in the amount of local versus distant newspaper coverage. Recognizing the vast biophysical, demographic and readership differences between the American West and the Northeast, we contrast the two areas in our analyses. In addition to biophysical and underlying land use variation in these regions, we expect proximity and the magnitude of the event to drive number of newspaper stories and length of coverage. Understanding the influence of proximity to a wildfire on media coverage helps inform how our understanding of social perceptions of wildfire threat as well as opportunities to shape those societal views.