Disaster media, with Matt Pearce and Emma Kemp

29:59But the veracity of that information is questionable. And there's a big downside to that kind of app.

30:08If you like what you're hearing on this episode, there's a place where you can join the conversation. It's called Cujoplex, and it's a private online hangout zone on Discord where smart, cool weirdos just like you, you know, people who like talking about the evolving state of independent culture, can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. We've had some great conversations lately about creative economies, media theory, AI, politics, the future of journalism, and even the records and TV shows we've been obsessing over this year. Some of our chats have even inspired episode ideas.

30:44You can get access to Cujoplex along with our monthly bonus episodes by signing up for a paid subscription over at our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. Were there any media sources that you all normally pay attention to that you just like completely kind of tuned out during that time? It's like, this is going to be all garbage or something. Oh, oh yeah. I had an embarrassing TikTok addiction on the first night of the fires when I was still trying to figure out. And I hadn't learned about Watch Duty yet, hadn't downloaded yet. So I was like in the proverbial wilderness. And so at one point or a couple of times, I cracked open TikTok, which, of course, is dominated by its algorithmic recommendation feed.

31:32And it was just totally hopeless and clueless. Like at certain points, it showed awareness that like a gigantic disaster was immediately around me. But it was serving me up kind of junky videos about it. And then it would serve me up something completely unrelated when I would swipe the video. And I had this really vivid sensation on that first night of the fire when I was swiping through the TikTok app, realizing that TikTok did not care whether I lived or died. And I at one point also popped over to X, the new sort of Vichy version of Twitter. And it was like just loaded up with conspiracy theories and fear mongering and a lot of like right wing trolling in particular, which has been encouraged under Elon Musk's ownership.

32:25And that used to be the place for breaking news journalists, including myself, to go gather and share the latest information. It was really invaluable as a source like that over the previous decade. And I got on there and I was just like, this is awful. I mean, it's mostly for right wing opinion formation, which, you know, if you're a right winger, then like that's really great for you. But for most people looking for anything else, it was pretty, pretty useless. And so that was another really interesting experience from this disaster was, you know, in those moments when I look towards social media.

32:57I mean, so many of our social media platforms now are dominated by pretty heavy handed algorithmic recommendation engines. And that's such an interesting curatorial decision in a disaster situation. I guess not even a curatorial decision, it's just a business decision by the platforms. But, you know, one of the most important things in a disaster is chronology and timeliness and getting the newest information the fastest and the latest. And that's no longer how our social media platforms are set up because over the past, you know, five to 10 years, they've been switching over to recommendation algorithms based on engagement and other factors.

33:35And that is something that I think perhaps people without even realizing it has altered the way that they encounter disasters on social media when they're on social media. So overall, I give pretty, pretty poor marks to the social media platforms overall as breaking news resources. But I did have a couple of friends who said that their number one favorite combination during the disaster was WatchDuty app with the Reddit threads for the Los Angeles subreddit. And that turned out to be a favorite pairing for some people because a lot of that was very heavily human curated. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up, Matt, because, yeah, for me, I'm not a big TikTok girl, but I am admittedly a big Instagram girl.

34:21And I just, like, barely went on Instagram. I'd go on it periodically to, like, do my due diligence, like, from a work perspective. But what it really did was highlight to me just how willfully insular the narratives of social media have become. And obviously, like, we all, you know, intellectually know that, but we can't escape it either, right? They're such a regular part of our lives, whether you're, you know, helping create the news or you're just someone consuming it. And just it was it was almost it was like a tonal difference. It just was like this this gut feeling of like nothing I need is going to be here.

34:55Like, let's let's go back to the real news, you know. And I just I just found that realization to be kind of particularly interesting. It really underscored something we all think about, but maybe don't give enough credit to. writing for semaphore the ceo of the ankler janice min lamented that the wildfires quote exposed a ravaged los angeles media ecosystem she wrote this is kind of a long quote so bear with me in my multiple text chains was the constant question what's the best place to get information the answers were a hodgepodge of new apps and websites watch duty genesis wildfire viewer Google Docs shared by neighbors about what burned down, Roan drone footage and Instagram reels.

35:39Not once did anyone cite a Los Angeles media outlet, save for old school local broadcast news channels. Setting aside the fact that this is perhaps insulting or this is quite insulting to the journalists who were reporting their hearts out during the fires. Do you agree with this reading of what media should look like in the event of a crisis? like there should be this sort of like centralized sorts of information that is a legacy media and that those sources of information in this case failed? Or do you think that this leaves something to be desired? I think there's totally two sides to the story and two ways to view that particular experience of the fires, at least from a media perspective.

36:14The first off is that legacy media has been hammered. And I'm talking in terms of its employment levels of local journalists, its ability to respond and cope quickly to huge disasters that are novel in character and require some adaptation by your newsrooms. That's a place where the long-time shrinking of the business models for television, for newspapers, really hurt you when you're trying to swing into action during a really uncertain situation like this. You just have less productive capacity to be able to adapt to and respond to and deliver the absolute best stuff when it really truly matters.

36:55And so that's something that's also real. But the other thing is real is that information consumption, you know, especially in the United States, but also basically everywhere these days, it's an environment where a lot of the risk and the responsibility for knowing about a disaster and getting information about it has been shifted from institutions onto the public and onto individuals. And so, you know, it's kind of your responsibility to go figure out what's going on with this fire that's burning, you know, a couple of neighborhoods over from yours. It's your responsibility to go decide what kind of website that you're going to go to to get information or what app to download.

37:31You may have some extremely limited and sometimes erroneous situations where public safety officials will send an emergency alert directly to your device. But otherwise, we live now in this very risk-shifted information environment where, you know, in the old days, you'd be watching three TV channels and each of them had news departments that would cut in and deliver the latest on a big disaster in the area. Or if you were just getting it through a newspaper every 24 hours or so, even if you would just subscribe for the sports section, you know, news about the disaster would be on the front page.

38:05This is a world now where it's kind of on you to figure out what's going on with this disaster. And information consumption is also a muscle. It's on you to decide whether you're going to go seek out good sources or to find those good sources or to hear about them or whether you're just going to kind of flail around because you've just gotten out of the habit of reading traditional news sites that might be providing that kind of information. So I think that's something that absolutely cuts both ways. You have newsrooms that have much diminished capacity to cover these events, but you also have consumers who are basically responsible for their own informational welfare.

38:40And a lot of them aren't very good at it. hasn't that kind of to a degree always been the case though it's just there's so many more you know quote-unquote options for them now than there were before there are and there aren't you know what i mean like you said like before it was just like there's the newspaper and like the radio station and like a handful of tv stations and now there's a multiplicity of options so is it really like i mean even what i'm asking cuts both ways but i just wanted to flag that no i think it's Totally true because like it always, you know, you had some basic degree of responsibility to be aware of your environment.

39:13But I think what's different now is that a lot of our sources of information, I mean, this is kind of basic, but like a lot of them just aren't even based here. You know, you might in the old days have a locally operated and locally owned radio station or a locally operated and locally owned TV station where the matter of a fire in your environment is a direct, immediate concern, both to your listenership, but also to the ownership of the people who work there. But if you live in an environment of like informational platforms, those companies aren't here. They're elsewhere. They're operated by pretty hands off and absentee algorithms.

39:48And I think that like my experience of encountering the platforms that now deliver, you know, a large percent of my informational diet is that they kind of don't care about this stuff. and they kind of have abandoned a lot of their civic mission that I think you would still see attached to more 20th century forms of media. And, you know, some of that might be the lack of FCC regulations on internet companies the same way that traditional broadcast companies might have. Some of it is that I think these companies genuinely are less responsible than what we had in the 20th century. There's just less civic spirit.

40:21It was funny, just a quick interjection. And when you were describing Watch Duty, I was like, where do we have anything even resembling that in the traditional media anymore? And I was like, the only newsroom I could think of that could like anywhere get close to like simulating something like that would be the New York Times. In terms of like the amount of resources they have and the ability to generate these like rapid fire timelines and stuff. Like they're not in L.A. I wonder if it opens up like a new way of like kind of imagining the sort of depth of rapport and all the possibilities for legacy media, you know, because I do recognize that like a ravaged LA media ecosystem, I know that was the quote.

40:58It's a little bit of a disingenuous way of, I think, framing it. I mean, the LA Times has been really gutted out, has matched most very well over the last few years. And I think I was reading, though, that during the first month of January, so during the fires, that its site visitors went up like over 100 % compared with December 2024. And it's like a 50 % increase from last January. So people clearly were looking to the Elish Times and to our local paper for news and guidance during this catastrophe. But I also, you know, I recognize that media apps are able to be, they're more nimble. They can respond quickly because they don't have to craft story in the same way.

41:48And I think what reporters and journalists are really good at is crafting a story that gets, you know, to the heart of an idea for a moment and communicates something about it to the public. And I think that's, you know, that's what worries me about any kind of loss of legacy media is that we're losing that kind of in-depth reporting and storytelling. But maybe if the media apps take on the sort of direct notification kind of mode, it maybe allocates more time and resources to in-depth reporting. Totally. I think there's a kind of a negative space surrounding that Janice Min quote that you read, Emily, that I think is worth acknowledging.

42:29You know, where she said that, you know, not once did I see anyone cite a Los Angeles media outlet, say for old school local broadcast news channels. And I read that and I was like, besides the L.A. Times, what is she referring to? You know, there's not the L.A. Weekly anymore. I don't really see that as like the role of L.A. Mag. I mean, they're a magazine and they have a digital presence, but sure. But, you know, there's the local TV stations and there's the radio stations and the LA Times. So I don't know what else she was expecting people to even cite, which I also think speaks to the larger picture here of information access and why we're seeing people turn to these alternatives so much.

43:09Or maybe it's like she was just a giant subtweet of the LA Times because she's the CEO of the LA Times. Jen now runs a competing entertainment news business. So perhaps this is not completely and utterly. No, I mean, I think I think there is something true in her remark in the sense that, like, especially I mean, if you if you're an older Angelino, you remember when the L.A. Times was much more of a hegemonic news source for the city. And that's just that's just not the case anymore. And there is a lot of different types of media in L.A. now and mostly smaller. And I think that limits the ability of people to have a shared source of information about these crises, which in a way is like I saw this all the time when I was covering disasters elsewhere as a journalist for the LA Times.

43:57But like really one of the things that happens in disasters like these, that they do become civic bonding events. And very often it's radio, for example, or broadcasts that become a kind of civic rallying point for people whose entire lives have been upended. And so that actually is one of the great strengths of 20th century media, especially compared to, you know, more contemporary forms of social media, which is that they are a gathering place and they do serve that role as a rallying point or maybe a discombobulation or recombobulation zone after a tremendously upsetting event. And I should say that my sort of criticisms of the first night of LA Times coverage being a little shambolic, I mean, they very quickly then got themselves into motion and been delivering a lot of like incredibly important investigations and other day to day news updates since then that I think have been reflected in the fact that the audience stats have been ticking upward.

44:55And I just wanted to add on to what Matt was saying there about the notion of civic bonding during catastrophe, during crisis, and kind of attach that to what we're talking about in terms of the reorganization of our media landscape. Because I think that with the rise of social media, we see citizens, users, readers becoming active participants more and more. And one thing that I noticed about this particular scenario was that many of my community members and friends and neighbors, as much as we were using apps and media to get information, it didn't really feel like enough to just get information.

45:31And so a lot of the role of the apps that we were using was to organize response efforts. And I think that also speaks to a lack of function on the part of the centralized agency to deliver aid. Although I think that it's happening now. But in that immediate moment during the fires, everyone was really organizing how to help with evacuations, how to deliver food to people. you know just like lots of energy and momentum occurring in various instagram chat groups and threads and whatsapp groups to help organize and then it was interesting seeing sort of the la times and the new york times actually pick up on that and some of the work was written about so yeah i thought that was interesting yeah there certainly were a lot you saw people using the internet for good you know actually i would love to just pounce on instagram all day every day go after it for things that I think are bad.

46:28But no, I think actually Emma touched on something where Instagram in particular does play, I think, a really positive role later in disasters like these, which is that when you have the power of publishing in the hands of local businesses and local nonprofits and other civic leaders, I'm talking like maybe when the immediate crisis is passed, that stuff becomes like a really effective nexus for all sorts of community organizing and community updates. And I should actually, for all that I would, you know, condemn Mark Zuckerberg for everything that he's done to us, that is something that I think has been very positive in sort of later stages of disaster recovery.

47:08Yeah, I want to circle back a little bit to the original question here. Should we be conflating the media, how we've traditionally thought of journalism, among its other responsibilities, storytelling, getting people information, is centralizing the plethora of information that is now out there in our contemporary information ecosystem, also the responsibility of media and journalists? Or, you know, who is the onus on when it comes to finding and centralizing this kind of information, especially because how much there is and how many disparate sources there are, just the act of bringing all these pieces together has kind of become its own additional form of labor?

47:48Yeah, honestly, I look to our hegemonic monopolistic technology platforms to take a little bit more responsibility in trying to feature the high quality local information and environments like these, because I do think that the ability to try to reach all of the public and to be a tentpole for, you know, every Angeleno or whoever else in a disaster zone has been affected like this. It's literally beyond the capabilities infrastructurally of any news outlet that exists today or is going to exist tomorrow. I mean, how we encounter information now is heavily determined by third-party companies that make billions and trillions of dollars off of controlling that access to local news outlets.

48:33And so I don't know, you know, in the United States, we don't really have a tradition so much anymore of having government regulation force companies like that to host information. You know, there used to be some pushes along those lines with the Federal Communications Commission in the 20th century with broadcast. And that was premised on, you know, broadcast airways being a limited resource that had to be regulated. And these companies were perhaps common carriers or things like that. We don't really have that same kind of legal regime for giant tech platforms. So we should talk about that. I mean, if we're going to have these monopolistic platforms that control the information that we get, I do think it's reasonable to expect that in situations like these in exchange for allowing them to continue to exist as monopolies, then yes, they should have some greater civic burdens for trying to be an affirmative source of, you know, quality information in this kind of environment.

49:26Yeah, I think I agree with Matt. I mean, I but I also I just think we have in the U.S. especially such a fractured and sort of fragile relationship to authority and to like trust in authority. And so when I think about trying to centralize across these various distributed modes of information and hubs, you know, the question is like, who do we trust to do that? And who will the public trust to be a centralizing force? And I think it's a really important question. And, you know, as Matt suggested, yeah, perhaps the onus and the responsibility and the funding probably should come from the tech monopolies.

50:08But again, it's like, what do we risk by having them aggregate? And it brings up questions of censorship and access and who is compiling and what is being compiled and what is being shown. And so it's a really fascinating question. And I don't think there's an easy answer, but I don't think it can be the responsibility of the media outlets itself. I think that's the legacy media, traditional media, whatever we want to call it, is under-resourced and overburdened as it stands. And I feel like asking them to also do the work of aggregating various sources, that doesn't quite seem like it should be their role.

50:47But I don't know exactly whose role it should be. Well, it's interesting also that people in a time of crisis will do this work for free, or they'll just take it upon themselves out of the goodness of their heart. And I'm not saying that should be the case, but it's also acceptable for people who are not professional journalists to want to join in and want to help, right? And a lot of those people did help. And I wonder if there's a conversation to be had about giving people more actual tools to do like their own authoritative reporting or if that... I've seen like conversations about this like in traditional media as well.

51:24Like, is there sort of a moment where the media also views itself as an institution that teaches the public how to newsgather if they want to do so. Annalie, this is one of the great, I think, dichotomies and dilemmas of the information environment in a disaster situation like this, because what you'll see in a disaster is literally the best of human nature. I mean, often in other types of disasters, when there's a tornado or an earthquake or something and your house gets knocked down, you're most likely to get rescued by your neighbor rather than the fire department or the National Guard. I mean, Rebecca Solnit has written a book about this paradise built in hell that talks about humans' tendencies to band together in disaster situations and how we often overstate the risks of, you know, what you might otherwise think of as a quote unquote lawless environment.

52:19And I think you can absolutely see that with something like Watch Duty, where you will have some volunteer labor contributing because people really believe in it. But on the other side, the consequences of a totally decentralized, individualistic information environment is also reflected in the media that we also currently have on social media, where you have places like X, where there are crisis entrepreneurs will use a disaster to gain attention and literally make money. And it's so funny that like a lot of very valid criticisms of the profit motives of 20th century media companies have only become even more hyper concentrated with social media and the creator economy where individual content creators are far more directly exposed to market forces than 20th century media outlets ever were.

53:14it's like a really brutal assigning editor sometimes you can just see directly what gets engagement but i did i did want to touch on something that emma emma touched on where the united states is an outlayer i mean the whole world is experiencing this phenomenon with the shift to more fractured information environments but one place where we do still stick out is the fact that like we don't have a really well-funded public broadcaster the way that a lot of other advanced democracies do. You know, the BBC in Britain, the CBC in Canada, ABC in Australia. You know, the Australian Broadcasting Company, part of its mandate and its charter and its mission when they're justifying why taxpayers should be funding a massive public option in an age of, you know, abundant information is exactly for its availability to be an emergency informational resource for all parts of Australia, including places that are underserved by traditional market media.

54:16And that's something that we don't quite have in the U.S. I mean, we're massively underfunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That means the grants that stations like KCRW are going to get a lot smaller than what they might be in other countries that have a higher priority of having a public option in situations like this. And so when we have a conversation like this about the media and its responsibility and its role in a disaster like this, It's also contained within this very narrow intellectual framework where we're talking about a country that has left it to the private market and to individual actors to try to make the best of really bad situations.

54:53And it should be noted that most other countries choose not to have their information environments structured precisely like this. That's a really great point. And given all this, what did the wildfires to you reveal about the role of the journalists specifically in the times of environmental crisis? Was there a way in which they helped kind of clarify the purpose of journalism for each of you? I don't think the wildfire clarified the role of climate journalism for me in any kind of way. I think that the reporting that has occurred subsequent to the giants, specifically around Karen Bass and the sort of emergency response systems that we have in place and the sort of relationships between our civic infrastructure and our local governance and our broadcast systems.

55:47I think the reporting that's happening there is really important and really powerful. There's been one or two good articles that have emerged on the role of climate catastrophe and climate change in terms of or in relation to this particular megafire incident. and another really good article I read, I believe, I think it was in the New York Times actually, about sort of building in, you know, building in vulnerable, fire vulnerable areas and the role of sort of L.A. city planning and how we, you know, how we kind of build and develop Los Angeles and how that contributes to these kind of catastrophes.

56:31So I think the report in there is really strong. Again, I think it's a distinction between these kinds of stories and investigative reporting and those sort of in the moment media sources that we're looking to during the fires themselves. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this one, again, just because it's been so much of my life for the past couple of months. I mean, I've felt more focused in my work than I have in a very long time and about the role of a station like the one I work out or just the role of local journalism specifically. And, you know, I think one of those things is like telling telling people stories like that's one thing that there's no incentive for, like elevating stories that are otherwise not going to get heard and experiences like through climate disasters that are not otherwise going to get heard unless there is some kind of, you know, algorithmic or financial incentive attached to it.

57:26you know, the way that people are impacted by these. And that's one of the things that like, we really focus on at my workplace. Like we're not really a breaking news organization, but taking the long view, looking at things like cultural impact, being on the ground, you know, with folks whose stories would otherwise get overlooked and making sure they stay in the conversation and are being incorporated into the broader public narrative. Like I see that as something that that kind of only journalism can do. And feel free to push back if you guys disagree with me, because again, I'm coming at this from like a very subjective perspective, right?

58:03And also going back to the centralization thing that we were talking about, like I actually kind of do for better or for worse, think it's now a journalistic responsibility to be helping centralize information as it comes out, like the kind of refrain that I had while the fires were still going on was like, I'll be the person with 72 tabs open so you don't have to be, you know, and it started with like kind of putting out the default, like I think every news outlet out there had like kind of a basic thing on their website that was like, here's the emergency numbers, like here's a link to like Metro and like all the road closures and all that kind of stuff.

58:40And, you know, here's where you can track what's going on with the fire department and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, most outlets like fell away, you know, within a couple of days of continuing to update that stuff once the initial information was out there. And we kind of made a point of continuing to exhaustively update our resource guide daily for at least a month. And I was completely blown away by the amount, and again, I'm not saying this to be self-serving, it's more just kind of something I was genuinely surprised about, like how much response that kind of thing got and how appreciative people were at having a consistently updated, categorized place, especially like you know when people are dealing with being outside of their house and like no longer having any belongings and stuff like that and and having a dedicated space to go and just kind of find links to all the information if nothing else um and i think that's part of like the what the role of journalism has become is like sifting through and collecting and vetting organizing and making that information as useful to the public as possible when there is more information than ever like it's kind of its own form of journalism now in my opinion should it Should it be?

59:48I don't know. But I think it's just a fact of the reality. I mean, this is something that I got really interested about because, you know, sifting and analyzing and synthesizing. This is the province of a lot of artificial intelligence development these days. And so I sent out a survey to, you know, subscribers of my Substack and friends just to ask, like, how are you using artificial intelligence during this disaster? Because, I mean, the fundamental, like, I don't know, crisis that we're all living through every time you crack open your phone is we're all in an environment of massive information overproduction.

1:00:24Like, the human brain cannot possibly process all the information that is available, nor would you know how to find all of it. And so this is the great promise of, you know, technologies like AI. But I was just curious, given the amount of AI take-up there's been in the consumer marketplace, people are using it for all sorts of little stuff these days. and sometimes bigger stuff. I was very curious to see, you know, how people were using AI, if at all, during the fires. And the responses I got were really interesting because it mostly showed a drop-off in how people were using AI to sift through information.

1:01:01Like people mostly weren't going to chat GPT or Anthropic to try to suss out information about the fires. They felt like pretty strongly that they wanted to get information from a human. They wanted to know that there was a human being on the other side of this data collection who was making decisions about what they were going to see. And they were largely avoiding algorithmic sort of meddling that, you know, they didn't know whether the information was accurate. And so there were a lot of kind of embedded beliefs that artificial intelligence summaries of the information that's scraping may not be accurate.

1:01:40And so it should be noted that when the shit was hitting the fan that really mattered, people turned away from AI because they saw the technology as unreliable. The one place where there was an exception to that was I also asked about people just using social media with AI powered recommendation algorithms. And that was the part where there wasn't a drop off in usage. You know, people in terms of the stories that are being told or videos being elevated, you know, social media did have some staying power for people, even the heavy handed recommendation algorithms, which I count as a version of AI, even if it's not.

1:02:19sort of commonly talked about that way. So people were still kind of using the technology for its curatorial and sorting powers, but they were way more skeptical when it really counted of, you know, synthetic summaries and things like that. Yeah. I wonder, at least with social media algorithms, it's like, it's sorting the opinions of people as you see who is saying what. And I wonder, like, even as you know there's conversations in in in ai currently people are working on models that like have citations for example but even then i don't know if people would i don't know if people are going to trust it i don't know if they'd ever be able to trust it on the same level as like an expert or a journalist i think it's really it's really fascinating um just to know the sort of skepticism and you know rightly so the skepticism that we have towards uh ai summaries in terms of the accuracy of data being presented to us when we use chat gbt and yet the sort of willingness to consume information that is presented by non-expert humans on social media um i and i assume and i'm just guessing here but i assume it's that we as humans believe that humankind generally is operating from a position of truthfulness or a sort of you know that people have a sort of moral compass and ethically uh attempting to share correct information even if they're wrong about it um and we don't extend that same kind of leniency moral ethical kind of relation to that to the ai uh but i i will say that during the fires you know i wasn't really watching reels and stuff on Instagram, but I occasionally, if I went to the dark place and they did go there, like a lot of the information I was receiving was incorrect and it wasn't incorrect on purpose.

1:04:14It was just, it was misinformation because it was non-experts who were taking up a public platform to share advice, do this, do this, don't do this. But actually, because I was involved in other communities that did have experts, I knew that that advice was erroneous, although I'm sure many people didn't. So I do find that just interesting kind of anthropologically. Oh, yeah. People are wrong all the time. I actually, there was, okay, so I want to talk about really specific AI usage that fascinated and kind of worried me. So specifically, there was a really big information gap after the immediate fire disaster where people were like the air outside.

1:04:56Is it safe to breathe? Do I need to have a mask on? Yes. Yeah. Like, am I going to get mesothelioma because of the asbestos? Like, am I breathing in somebody's house? Am I going to get lead poisoning? And this is the thing where like it's basically beyond the clarity of even the best experts to provide precise information about the level of risks, partially because first off some of this stuff you kind of don't truly know exactly how dangerous it is second off like you don't know the precise level of exposure or risk you have at any given portion of the city is the soil more toxic here is it less toxic here am i safe if i'm farther away from the fire is the aqi reading for traditional like la air pollution is that a reliable stand-in for knowing if the air outside is poisonous.

1:05:48Like this is something that is basically beyond sort of immediate measurement for each person who's making health decisions. And so I had a couple of people, you know, saying that when they did use AI, sometimes it was for like health advice where they're trying to ask the AI, like it's a doctor, you know, okay, given all these factors that I'm such and such far away from the fire and this is the stuff that's in the air and that's burning, you know, How much risk am I in? Because I think it's a question that no one has an exact answer to. And even the answers that you will get from experts are sometimes conflicting.

1:06:25And that was really one of the huge information gaps that I'm still wrestling with after the fires, where that whole moment where the city was like, is it safe to breathe? And I still don't, I couldn't still give you a confident answer here, you know, a couple months later. it's really something that struck me and how people are trying to get information that basically wasn't there yeah i'm so glad you brought that up because there was also i don't know if you guys noticed this but i think there's kind of this phenomenon of like people not wanting to take yes for an answer like if they would hear on one climate panel you know top top top experts like people that were deep in the you know trenches of the maui fires and all that saying you know as long as you're 10 to 15 miles away from the burn zone like you'll be fine i'm in chat groups and I had friends that would like, you know, hear that and read that and be like hearing that they were safe made them not believe it.

1:07:17You know what I'm saying? I find that to be like symptomatic of the information ecosystem. Like unless you're hearing bad news and that you're like totally screwed because we're so acclimated to that urgency. I find that people are just going to want to keep consuming and consuming until they get to the result that seems the most doomed. You know what I'm saying? I think it goes the other direction, too. It's also people want to be told that they're OK. You know, they want to be told that it's OK to take your mask off. You don't you don't have to worry too much. And like that's a really wild space to be in when you're making decisions in a sort of low information environment.

1:07:49It's weird. There's so much so much data and so low information at the same time when you're facing a question like that. Emma has rightly pointed out in the comments that it probably hasn't been safe to breathe in L.A. for decades. That's what I've weirdly taken comfort in. So looking forward, as these sorts of climate disasters become more and more frequent, how might climate disasters like the LA wildfires, like Hurricane Helen, transform what media looks like, both traditional and non-traditional, and how we understand its role? Can you imagine things just almost shifting as a result of the need to cover more and more of this stuff, or this happening more and more?

1:08:27I mean, I imagine that the local government agencies are looking at apps like WatchDuty, you know, hopefully, ideally, wondering how to kind of scale that at the local government level or to at least invest in it or to have some kind of relationship with an app that can be kind of trusted at that scale to do that kind of media work in terms of data delivery in a crisis. I think that we're going to see more and more people trying to become involved in their community broadcasting. You talked a little bit earlier, I think, Eldrea, about the notion of like citizen journalism and what that would look like.

1:09:09And I, you know, I think it's we're right to be wary of arming all of the citizen users with a high tech microphone and camera. But I do feel that more and more we're in an environment where people are skeptical and resistant to kind of legacy authority, really, and challenging it. And I imagine that one way that might be reflected in our media landscape is just that there maybe will be more kind of localized and smaller kind of groups emerging from within communities. then I think the work needs to be done to make bridges between folks who are experienced and like reporters and journalists who've been doing this work for a long time and have a lot of knowledge and understand how it works.

1:09:56There needs to be bridges built between those things. Otherwise we do it we end up in a really dangerous place so we have you know all prepared or unprepared people presenting facts that are not in fact true and that can be very harmful. And the line is also between, you know, legacy media and new media or whatever is just becoming also increasingly porous. Like most journalists do not have staff jobs anymore. They're working on their own and they have that training. But yeah, I don't think we can make that hard divide anymore. So like, what do we do with that? I was thinking even of how the LA Times, the Instagram kind of report in the LA Times 404 platform, which is a sort of interesting bridge, right?

1:10:38Because it takes the legitimacy and kind of credentials of a legacy media like the LA Times and it extends it to a much younger kind of audience using Instagram Reels as the sort of publishing format. And the reporters tend to be younger and very social media savvy and are reporting in a manner and a style that is accessible to a younger audience. Like I see that as an interesting bridge. And it was one of the kind of cool things that LA Times has done is do that. And I wonder, I don't know, are there other examples that anyone here sees of sort of legacy media making a concerted effort to bridge in that same way?

1:11:19Yeah, I mean, I can't think of any off the top of my head. I wonder if it comes back to the case for like publicly funded journalism, where a few view journalism as being in the public interest, especially in a time of crisis like this. that's obviously a reason to back that idea. And also it doesn't have to just be, you know, giving money to the LA Times or whatever. It can also be funding, you know, civic organizations that teach citizens how to do this and pay them. Yeah, this is something that I now spend a lot of my time on exactly because the United States, relative to other advanced countries deeply under-invest in terms of how much it spends on public media and public interest journalism.

1:12:05So that's something that obviously needs to be corrected. Because I think in a situation like this, infrastructure is the whole bald game. I mean, one thing I'll say for larger traditional news organizations, which rightly come under a lot of criticism, the way that many institutions do for not being sufficiently responsive, is that having a division of labor, having different reporters on different beats who aren't having to respond always to like the big thing of the hour gives you the opportunity to investigate the long tail of these disasters. Because remember, like the disaster isn't just when the fire is like literally burning, but you know, in all the air that you're breathing afterward and the people who lost their houses and what happens to the insurance markets and the way that people process these disasters, not just what happened, but who is responsible.

1:12:51And if someone is responsible for how bad it got, what are the kinds of decisions that policymakers could make to try to alleviate the next one of these disasters from being as bad? And so having, you know, built in reporting staffs, having established audiences who know to look to you for information when the shit hits the fan, all of that stuff is the whole ballgame, because otherwise you have something that's more like what we have now, which is an increasingly depleted information environment that's increasingly fractured. There's just not a lot of flexibility and capacity there to respond the next time one of these things hit.

1:13:28I will say one piece of good news, though, which is I think that watch duty is thinking of expanding to other types of disasters like flooding, for example, or maybe maybe hurricanes, which is something that would be more geographically distributed across the U.S. in particular. So I think there are, among the success stories that we do have, there are ways to replicate them for other communities and to help build up that infrastructure so that you don't have so many people flailing around when the next totally unexpected event happens. There are ways of preparing even for things that you don't know are coming.

1:14:00I think where this question gets really fascinating and kind of next level is when you think about the possibility that like, you know, L.A. had the Internet, at least. But over here with Hurricane Helen, there were like large parts of North Carolina around Asheville where there was no Internet. There was no cell service for days and days and days, probably weeks. And people still found ways of sharing and transmitting information. And one example that I find very touching, my partner and I, he's from North Carolina, so we were kind of like tuned into this. There was a radio station. I think it might have been like Kiss FM or something, but like a digital Kiss FM country station that just like stopped its regular programming and turned into like this radio message board thing where we just be people calling in one after the other being like, hey, here's what's going on in my town.

1:14:55This road is closed. This road is open. Or people calling in and saying, hey, I'm looking for so and so. I'm actually calling from Colorado and I'm looking for my friend who lives in this specific town. If anybody knows where they are, can you call into the show? And it was just like such a pared down example of what media could look like. But I found it very beautiful. And I don't know, it got me thinking about like, does this mean that we need to start creating those kinds of resources right now? You know, or like building that in our local communities, like citizen radio stations, for example, that could serve as resilient in a time of crisis.

1:15:33Yeah, I love that story. Like that makes my heart feel so full. I mean, one thing we were talking about, again, I'm not trying to keep making this about the radio station I work for or anything. But, you know, one thing that gave us a lot of clarity was just like, of course, there's like all these Internet radio stations out there and this and that and social media. But it was not lost on us, like the value of having terrestrial radio stations. towers. And, you know, there were power outages and internet outages and all of this, you know, not nearly to the extent that there was, you know, in Nashville and Helen, like it, there was a gravity of like knowing that like we could just kind of keep going and like we would be available for people to tune into like kind of no matter what happened, as long as they had, you know, a couple of batteries and a radio or like whatever kind of access to that, like the signal is strong.

1:16:19And it just felt, yeah, it was a kind of like simplicity that I think like brought kind of a lot of focus to the work of like ultimately like you just got to keep putting information out there so people can find it on this one channel in addition to the million other channels that we were trying to navigate circling back to like let's meet all the audiences where they're at wherever they're at while we can but it was nice knowing that like ultimately this service was still there does that make sense yeah it makes sense and it's really haunting and it you know it's like similar i think to you know how i was on on the watchdue app how i was watching those those cameras that were just they were just broadcasting and overtaken by the fire but it similar kind of resonance to what you're talking about that just this you know the image in my mind of just you broadcasting and you know even if just one person has has some batteries left and gets to hear it they're not alone you know i think that's the human kind of element of of reporting and of communicating of reaching someone right that's like why are you at the core of it like you're trying to connect with someone out there in the world and be useful to them in some kind of way and that's at the heart you know of what we do exactly there's a real like almost like selflessness to it it's like the whole reason some of these mechanisms or media kind of were started was was to be like a beacon of like there's other people out there right i think that's why like in more remote areas that's like why people still listen to radio and stuff like that it's corny but like a lot of it does come down to like that just fundamental like connection that that provides emma i'd love if you could tell us a little bit about your work with the no canyon hills project but also what can it tell us about what a climate resilient media platform might look like yes uh so no canyon hills is a it's a group a grassroots non-profit group and movement and eco-media platform.

1:18:09I started with another person named Mateo Altman almost two years ago, and it began as a sort of direct response to the impending destruction of a mountain here in Tujunga, a range in the Vadugo Mountains, over 300 acres of the Vadugo Mountains that a private developer owns and you know 20 years ago this developer got entitlements by la city council to essentially demolish the the mountain to grade it to destroy the biodiversity and instead turn it into like a luxury private gated community of over 200 mcmansions um and yeah about two years ago he began applying for the grading permits for that project and so no canyon hills was a group that formed to oppose the impending grading of the mountain but it very quickly became a community space to talk about and to get folks from not only Los Angeles but actually kind of all over to get involved in sort of land use discussion in their towns and in their cities and in the areas and so it's grown into a really kind of a vibrant group of people that drop in and out and It's really organized around the production of media artifacts that share information and call people together, to gather, to do science, to collect data, to dialogue with local governments, city officials, city council.

1:19:41That's what we're doing. And so in terms of climate resilient media platforms, we are largely organized via social media. So in terms of resilience, if the power goes out, I have to train my 60 chickens to become powering chickens, I guess. But no, I think that one of the things we're really interested in doing as an organization is encouraging local people, wherever they are, to figure out how they can interface with their local government in the really critical kind of dialogues that need to happen on the ground around climate resilience, around land use, around land stewardship, conservation, around biodiversity, and all of these sort of interrelated factors that significantly impact the future of our climate reality on this planet.

1:20:29That's a great endeavor. I feel like the fires have sort of brought about, not just the fire, obviously this project like predates that, but we're sort of seeing, I guess, the sort of like saplings of a lot of like community organized media like your project or you know this isn't necessarily traditional media outlet but like the kind of work that we saw mutual aid LA during during the fires and the resources and like expertise that they were pulling together to kind of help push things forward and and keep that momentum going and keep people organized instead of just kind of like fracturing into like immediate gratification volunteer work for lack of a better term and I'm seeing a lot of that crop up I was amazed at how much I've seen during the fires and and the momentum that's kept going from that, which I guess kind of goes into our last question, something that I'm thinking a lot about, which is how do you guys think we keep people's attention, that media and journalism keeps people's attention on these issues after the initial disaster subsides, especially when our news ecosystem is like so geared towards the next breaking news headline?

1:21:32How do we, especially with maybe the limited resources that local in these rooms might have, stay on top of information that's maybe less immediately urgent, but I would argue perhaps more critical to the outcomes of these disasters. I wish I had a really great answer to this. And my concern is that I don't. You're like, I've actually been sitting on the solution this whole time. I've been busy, quietly patenting it so that I can reap the rewards for myself. No, I mean, this is part of the reason why I took a public policy job with Rebuild Local news, which develops policies to basically create more public funding for local news outlets exactly because, you know, the commercial imperatives and even for nonprofit newsrooms, the imperative of following, you know, later more breaking news stories that are impacting your community.

1:22:26It's just it's more than anyone can really bear with the resources that we have. And so I took a job that's basically aimed at trying to create more resources for local news outlets of all kinds so that you have more capacity to try to cover this stuff. Because otherwise, you know, I'm also like an attention economy person and it's just brutal out there. You know, the attention market is the single most competitive market that we have. And, you know, covering stories that have implications for climate change, but also zoning and insurance. Like a lot of stuff is not sexy, breaking news that people are going to be just like, you know, swiping desperately on their phones to scroll down on.

1:23:10But it's incredibly important because it affects the course of disasters like these. And so you kind of need people who are able to follow boring stories and then figure out how to tell them in a really compelling way to the public so that the public is better prepared when the next one of these comes along. Or if something went wrong, that, you know, the people who are responsible are doing what they can to make sure that the problems get fixed. And so in some ways, the problems that we face as journalists are the problems that have always existed for us, which is how do you hold on to the attention of a desperately distracted and overwhelmed public who we are trying to serve and, you know, over time have other priorities.

1:23:53And I don't think there's an easy answer to that. And whoever does come up with an easy answer is probably going to be a trillionaire. Well, it's not going to be me, but I agree with Matt. It's a really complicated question. And I lament the sort of dismantling of the humanities at the educational level also because I feel like what we really need to preserve is storytelling and is folks that want to report on crucial stories and deliver the news to people in a way that is compelling and interesting. And there is a lot of interesting work happening in the podcast space. Shout out to what we're doing right now.

1:24:34But in terms of breaking news media and media platforms, something that we've tried to do with No Canyon Hills is to realize and accept that attention is extremely limited. And actually, many people don't have the capacity to take in information unless it directly impacts them in some way. So the question becomes, like, how do you reach people beyond just the immediate community that is affected, right? Because in order to really have change at scale, at the sort of civic level, you need to have broad buy-in from a larger base. And so how do you do that? So something we've tried to do is to engage the arts, graphic design, visual media, participatory events to really get people involved to link the stuff that we're talking about with their own lives in some ways.

1:25:30So those are just some of the strategies that we as a sort of media platform are employing. You know, our case is unique because we're not a news organization, right? We're a weird, indistinguishable group of people that have a kind of particular goal, but the goal has sort of telegraphed out into a much broader and larger directive as we've been working. So, yeah, I think one of the most like critical mistakes that we see some of the best and most well-intentioned like traditional media organizations make is like just kind of presuming the value of their stories and their content unto itself and not really thinking about what are people going to do with this information?

1:26:12You know, I think we live in a world of such needing to ascribe like utility to whatever we put out there in the attention economy and thinking about if you're going to put it on this platform in this format, how do we want people to engage with it? And it sucks because it requires like so much more work and time. But, you know, I think the most like despairing and like damaging thing that can be done is creating a really potently like written and beautiful story. And it just kind of disappears into the ether and no one reads it. I have two more thoughts. Yes. Which is like another tactic is just writing like really, really wonky stuff about like the people who are in charge of things and how they go wrong and letting those stories have their impacts.

1:26:54And it's like less about making the public care per se, but just like holding people accountable. Right. On the one hand. And on the like broader mass cultural scale, I'm sure there is going to be in the next, you know, 10 years more and more of a climate related youth movement. Right. There's going to be protest groups. It could be cool to become a climate activist or you hope I can only see that happening. Right. And then, you know, using culture journalism to capture that moment and not call them terrorists or whatever. Does that make sense? yeah totally like vice for climate activism no or just like not calling the resistance terrorists and yeah and spreading fake news about them but actually like celebrating them and presenting it as like a valid thing to do i guess i feel like if you're gonna do anything of note you're gonna get called a terrorist by somebody at this point in time yeah i and this is not to say that this is not an endorsement of like this is not how to blow up a pipeline even i'm saying like not not acting like a cop when people actually try to do something or raise awareness of something.

1:28:03Yeah, it's gonna because it's you're right, Emily, like, because it's gonna become a way of life. Like it just is. It's going to become imbued in the culture even more than it has already because it's an undeniable fact of life. And it's going to become that more so it's going to be shaping so much. Yeah. And I think there needs to kind of be narratives and cultural language and folks embedded to tell those stories the right way. Totally. All right. Well, Emma and Matt, this has been really fun. Is there anything else that either of you'd like to add? I just want to say thank you. It's really nice to talk with all of you about this.

1:28:36Really appreciate it. This has been so fun. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, I feel like I could honestly keep talking about this for another two hours, but we all have shit to do.

1:28:50This episode of The Culture Journalist was produced and edited by Emily Friedlander and me, Andrea Dominic. Our theme music is by Mark Donica. To check out more, head to our Substack. That's theculturejournalist.substack.com. And if you like what you're hearing, leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or share us with friends to help support independent journalism.