Category: 2012 wildifres

Two recent, sober analyses of extreme events on the landscape - one on widespread US drought and the other on recent and ferocious wildfires in and  around the Rockies - offer lessons for any journalist covering such things.

• Columbia Journalism Review/The Observatory - Tom Yulsman: Flames, Cause, and Context ; This is a link-filled roundup of stories on the fires consuming woodlands, forests, and prairie in western US. He moves expeditiously through the big picture and writes, "..as one fire after another seemed to pop up in the parched and sun-baked region in June and early July, reporters, bloggers and opinion writers began trying to move the story beyond the details of breaking news to causes and context. There was much to discuss."The column's strength is to zero in on how disparate coverage...