Resilience-Focused Journalism: The Motivations, Tactics, and Impact of the Los Angeles Times Coverage of Earthquake Risk

ABSTRACT

As disasters and climate change threaten more and more people around the world, it is increasingly important for communities to adopt resilience policies. However, despite considerable benefits and the high probability of a return on investment, resilience policies are often neglected. In this article, we examine the agenda setting campaign by the Los Angeles Times that helped create the conditions for mandatory retrofitting ordinances to succeed where previous attempts failed. Through in-depth interviews with journalists and editors at the Times, and policymakers involved in the debate, we illustrate the motivations, tactics, and impact of their coverage of earthquake risk in Southern California. The article contributes to the understanding of agenda setting, risk communication, and local news production by demonstrating why and how journalists can effectively communicate risks and enable policy change, which could apply to a range of environmental threats.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• agenda setting
• risk communication
• localization
• data journalism
• visual communication
• interviews
• journalism
• earthquakes

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for excellent comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Brad Aagaard, Martha Cox-Nitikman, Mitch Englander, Shelby Grad, Thomas Heaton, Beverly Kenworthy, Rong-Gong Lin II, Doug Smith, Greig Smith, and Rosanna Xia for their participation in the interviews. This study was approved by the University of Southern California Institutional Review Board, and received approval number UP-17-00642 on 21 September 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Earthquake risk communication is arguably even more difficult to pursue than climate change. First, there are fewer catastrophic earthquakes compared to climate-related events which reporters can attribute to climate change. Second, people have more daily indicators of climate change risk than earthquake risk, which could make resilience-focused journalism about earthquakes more difficult.

2 Soft-story buildings are constructed with ground floors that are weaker than the rest of the building. During an earthquake, the ground floor might collapse under the weight of the other floors. Non-ductile concrete buildings are at risk from collapsing when under stress from lateral movement, where the load bearing beams, columns, and joints are unable to hold.

3 Previously, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety inspected buildings to ensure they are safe, and inspectors labeled buildings according to their risk during earthquakes. However, any recommendations for property owners to retrofit buildings were voluntary.

4 Focal questions for the interviews are provided in the Appendix. Full transcripts of the interviews are available from the authors upon request.

5 This data is reported in a book manuscript.