California is on fire, again. I grew up in the suburbs north of Los Angeles and have family scattered around the Bay Area. Almost every year, I watch as part of the state burns, hoping no one I know is too close.

Following fire news is hard, too hard, whether it’s an immediate emergency or a pang of fear from the other side of the country. Matt Pearce just ran into this in this, in his first fire season outside a newsroom.

The thing that happened with the death of mass media and the rise of the internet’s slop era feels like the same thing that happened with the shift from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution 401(k) retirement plans. In the old days, the news about a big fire was going to get handed to you. It was going to be on the handful of TV channels where you watch sitcoms, or on the front page of the newspaper that you had subscribed to for the sports section. Today, whether you get fire news is something you have to proactively seek and even weed out for. It’s a “you” problem that TikTok will happily serve up joke videos until the moment of your death.

But this isn’t new, and it’s telling that being in a newsroom hides the problem. I ran into the same thing in 2007, when I was living in China and my hometown was burning. Get outside, try to follow a fire when it really matters, and the difficulty is obvious.

Back in 2018, shortly after I joined Gannett’s Storytelling Studio, I wrote a guide to user needs in fire season. I came up with seven core groups with specific needs:

1. I live in an area with an active fire. My primary concern is safety, followed by property. More generally, I’m worried about my neighborhood, friends and eventually, thinking about recovery. I need information quickly and I need it prioritized. I’m probably on a phone and my internet might be choppy. This is an emergency.

2. I have family and friends in an area with an active fire. My primary concern is my loved ones’ safety, followed by more general concern for a town or neighborhood.

3. I’m in an area prone to fire, but there isn’t immediate danger. My primary concern is what might happen. I need to know how to prepare and when to be worried.

4. There’s a fire nearby, and I’m keeping an eye on things. I’m not in immediate danger, but the fire is affecting me indirectly: bad air quality, traffic, school closures. I’m also watching to see if the fire becomes dangerous.

5. I’m concerned about policy issues, like climate change, and fires are part of that story. Ongoing fires and lengthening fire season confirms my fears that climate change is already causing damage. Or I’m concerned about fire management, or housing policy. I’m worried, angry, frustrated, curious and want to share what I’m reading, but I’m not personally connected to the active fire right now.

6. I live in an area recently hit by wildfire, and I’m recovering. The immediate danger has passed, so my concern now is recovery.

7. I’m not connected but want to know what’s going on. I’m following the news and this is part of it. I’m not directly affected. I might be overwhelmed by details and need a big-picture view before any of it makes sense.

Some of these needs are in conflict, or at least difficult to serve at the same time.

Part of why covering fires is hard, especially in the social media era, is that people need different things from media, and no single news source can serve them all. Post a story about a current fire, and someone on BlueSky/X/Mastodon will complain that you’re not talking about climate change. Write a big picture look at policy choices and it gets mixed into friends’ safety check-ins on Facebook. Instagram and Threads are so algorithm-driven that certain use-cases aren’t even worth chasing.

The only advice I can offer is to be clear-eyed about what problem you’re attacking, and tune out the noise. This is why Watch Duty is having a moment.

Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.