Review of: BBC Women Reporting the World: Conversations with Foreign Correspondents , Colleen Murrell (2025) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 237 pp., ISBN 978-3-03185-197-1, p/bk, AUD 43.31 ISBN 978-3-03185-198-8, e-book, AUD 37.07
Understanding of disasters has evolved significantly over recent decades; disaster scholars now understand disasters to be a product of society as much as of nature, a confluence of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and society’s capacity to address it. Instead of a narrow focus on response, practitioners now engage in disaster risk reduction (DRR) to prepare for disaster events and mitigate against their impacts. However, this understanding of disaster and the principles of DRR are not broadly reflected in journalism about disasters. Disaster journalism continues to privilege stories about disaster events with the focus on warning, evacuation and response. Storytelling techniques used by journalists to engage audiences have implications for DRR-informed journalism. This research uses two concepts to analyse daily news podcast coverage of the 2022 flood disasters in eastern Australia: the narrative arc, used by journalists to tell a story, and the disaster cycle, used by DRR practitioners to better understand disasters. Through understanding the structure of a disaster story and comparing that structure with its representation of the phases of the disaster cycle, it is possible to identify patterns and cultural myths reinforced by narrative journalism about the 2022 floods and about disasters more generally. This analysis draws on narrative structures identified in daily news podcasts that complicate the relationship between disaster cycle and narrative arc to suggest alternative approaches that may be instructive for practitioners.
Australia is increasingly affected by extreme climate events, and how these events are reported on by the media is constantly evolving. Using the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 as a case study, this article examines how media practitioners at ABC Canberra navigate the challenges of emergency communication, with a particular emphasis on social media. Through qualitative interviews with thirteen staff from ABC Canberra, the research investigates how social media strategies, including real-time updates, audience engagement and direct communication with emergency services, enable these practitioners to broadcast during catastrophic emergencies. While the ABC still uses radio as a primary communication plank during an emergency, audiences are turning to a multitude of sources, and the ABC is increasingly including social media in its portfolio of emergency communication strategies. This article is focusing on how emergency broadcasting practitioners perceive the changes in emergency communication technologies and strategies, using a disaster communication ecology framework. The findings underscore the importance of an integrated communication approach that incorporates diverse sources and platforms to effectively inform and support communities during climate disasters. What we did find, as well, is that despite these technological changes, journalistic principles such as verification and ethical reporting remain key, as does familiar formatting, which provides reassurance in times of extreme climate events.
This article investigates the news and information pathways of Australian school leavers. The study centres the voices of young Australians to examine where and how they gather news and political information, and how they articulate strategies of consumption. This draws on a mixed-method study of recent Australian school leavers. Data were collected in early 2022 through an online survey ( N = 416) and follow-up semi-structured interviews ( N = 21). Although young people accessed a range of platforms and journalistic and non-journalistic sources, they turned to selected sources for trusted information across these platforms (e.g. ABC News, The Guardian ). Findings revealed strategies of consumption aligned with the concepts of routine surveillance, incidental exposure and directed consumption. While the sophistication of strategies varied, this article highlights the intentionality and agency in how young people navigate this complex information landscape, and the importance of trust and convenience in driving these behaviours.
Review of: Re-Thinking Travel Writing: The Journey of a Genre , Ben Stubbs and Lee Mylne (2024) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 222 pp., ISBN 978-3-03156-187-0, h/bk, EUR 119.99 ISBN 978-3-03156-190-0, p/bk, EUR 119.99 ISBN 978-3-03156-188-7, e-book, EUR 96.29
