Bridging the Flood Risk Info Gap: Insights from a Journalist-Scientist Collaboration in Louisiana

Thanks. Happy meeting.

So the current is a local news outlet. We are a nonprofit. Our primary focus really is the city of Lafayette area expertise within the journalism world would be like local government reporting. So we write a lot about, you know, what happens at the city council meeting and what the mayor is up to, and all that kind of stuff. But our real, you know, claim to fame, I guess, is we focus a lot on investigated enterprise journalism, and we really interested in the why and how of things were more so than the what happened, right? If you think about the big questions that journalism tends to ask.

And so, you know, we try to differentiate ourselves in that way, and we have the benefit of doing that on a nonprofit model. We think of journalism as a public service, and so we generally focus on storytelling that goes after public interest. Journalism.

I mean, the essential question was, how do we get people to better understand flood risk in principle, right? I mean, a thing that you would find just talking about it from the perspective of a journalist, right? You write a story about, you know, a flood mitigation project of some kind. And of course, the question that comes up is, is this going to help somebody? And to answer that question, you have to understand a lot of things about what causes flooding to begin with, and what would put your home or your neighborhood at risk?

And what we found often is that there was a disconnect between what the public generally understood were the root causes of flooding and what they demanded from their policy makers, right? And so there's a real gap. There's an information gap there that needed to be solved, and it's not an easy one, right? Especially if you kind of want to get above politics and talk about stuff that impacts people's lives in real ways, you have to kind of go back to the science, right? You have to go back to what you know and what you don't know.

And it made a lot of sense to me when the Reedy Allen opportunity came up to pursue a concept, because we worked with Emad primarily, is kind of like a, you know, as journalists tend to do as a source, right? Like going to come on explain X, Y or Z to me, right? So I can understand it, so I can report it, so we can talk about it. They're producing science that that was public, right, like we would read about it. Or. Read it and papers and things like that. And so it made a lot of sense to kind of just sort of connect those two dots together on the news gathering side, like rather than just sort of thinking about it.

Okay, well, here's a thing that we need to explain, but helping us understand how, as a an entity whose job it is to communicate information to the public, how we can do that better, and do so at the sort of very specific and often very confusing topic, which is flooding, which, of course, as you can imagine, in southern Louisiana, is a very important topic.

You know, what we generally found, right? Kind of, going back to what I said earlier, was, I think it just people tend to come at things from common sense, right? And you can't fault them for that. And so just to put it in more concrete terms, right? I mean, a lot of folks in this area of the country are in southern in Lafayette, particularly, we're under the presumption of that a main reason why their homes might flood was the river, which makes a lot of sense, like, there's a river that runs through Lafayette, like lots of communities. Like in lots of communities, and they're not wrong, but they're also not right, right?

And why does that even matter? Well, it matters because when something bad happens, and they go to their council person, or to the representatives, and they say, We need a fix, and they're presented with a fix that may or may not work, right? I mean, getting their arms around that can be really tricky. And so where we saw an opportunity here was is like, is there a mechanism that we can create that can sort of pierce that noise a little bit and give people a clearer sense of what their risks are? And, let's you know, even widen the frame a little bit more than that? We're not just sort of talking about when floods happen.

We're talking about risk in a very literal sense. I mean, people pay for risk, right? You buy flood insurance or homeowners insurance, right? And so people are experiencing changes in their lives by ways of increased insurance premiums, and may not quite understand why that's happening, and so you can see that anxiety and how people show up in council meetings, let's say, and demand a specific solution. And our thought was, well, there's an opportunity there, right? And to try and devise some sort of communication strategy to get the kind of more elemental.

Principles here into the pipeline for them, because most of the time in journalism, you're just talking about a thing that happened, right? I mean, you know, a flood happens. So here's, here's, here's what you do, or we built a project, and this is what we do. Very little space in that context to stop and say, Hey, wait a second. You need to understand about you need to understand this about the watershed that we're in. Let's define some basic terms.

And the trick, and I'll be upfront, I don't know that we've solved it yet, is how to create space for that that draws people's attention on an ongoing basis to where like, if the ideal is at the end of this, you have a more broadly informed community that understands, in principle, what's happening, right? And it's not even just what they know, it's what they also don't know, right? I mean that in a very generous way, right? Like, it's important to understand uncertainty in and of itself, like the things that we can't really know and the things that we can't control for.

The best way of thinking about it. It's almost like so it's a guide, right? So we developed a flood guide that explains some very basic principles of flooding and lays it out in a way that connects people to their own backyards, right?

And the mechanism, really, though, is a communications called a communication system, but it's really just an email, a triggered email system that when events of certain size or rain events of certain size come, people would get triggered an email letting them know about the risk, saying, hey, an event's coming that could cause flooding, and here's what we know about it, and then using that news event opportunity to present them with the guide, so that people would sort of be paired with, you know, the emergent situation.

Hey, there, there's a there's a storm that could cause flash flooding that might, you know, obstruct your wet route home from work, or whatever it is. Let's pause for a second and say, What's a flash flood, right? I mean, I think people don't even necessarily know what that means or why they happen, and so trying to use that event, the moment a person is most likely to be thinking about flooding and flood risk, to say, here's what's happening, here's why this has happened. So that's the tool that we made to be effectively a flood guide paired to an automated or automatic, automatically triggered email system.

It is active, but not currently. Man, so I think the the thing that we've not problem solved just yet is the calibration element. So, you know, think about it this way. How big of a storm Do you want to warn people about we live in Southern Louisiana. Over the past two weeks it has rained cats and dogs every day at around two o'clock, right? So you want an email system that shoots off an email every time it's, you know, throughout the entire rainy season, right? You basically have a monsoon every day in southern Louisiana. So we've been working through that piece of it. It's like, how often do you actually trigger this thing, right?

Those are actually very important. They're very important calibration issues, because if you over signal to people, they tune it out right? And so that's kind of where we left it off. Most recently, is try to work through what's a proper strategy for that. Do we need to send a weather alert every time there's going to be a hard rain and Lafayette? Because people are just going to say, like, what else is new? It's July, you know, that's not really newsworthy, as they say,

yeah, and, I mean, at this point, literally not, man, so the reporter that we had, who is a principal on the project, he went to law school, so we're actively trying to replace that bit of it, you know, the goal, I mean, I think this is actually something that you can track pretty well. I mean, it's a proxy, but it was basically, how big of an email list can you build, and how often do people open the emails that you send? Do they go to the flood guide? Do they read it?

How long do they spend with you have, in the context of digital publishing, a lot of really useful signals that you can tell you a lot about whether people are using what you've got, and to what extent, you know quantitatively, they're engaging it out deeply, right? I mean, of course, you know, longer term we would roll out. I think feedback surveys and qualitative feedback would be important too here.

And you know, part of what even brought us to this point is, you know, Emad and his team had been working separately on a similar sort of thing, like convening focus groups, understanding how different segments of the community were even approaching or sort of trying to understand the stuff of which journalists were a cohort of people that he interviewed. And so I would imagine we would do something similar to that too over time. I mean, sort of carpet for the horse. I mean something that we kind of have to do first is figure out, operationalize this to Emad's point on a sustained basis.

And I think, you know projects like this that that's a that's a struggle, right? Because, just like he's got his research, I've got my newsroom, right, and these are things that we've both chosen to prioritize here, but they can be difficult to keep going without. You know, a person whose job it is to wake up every day and think about that thing. And we were hopeful, of course, that the automated function of this, but using some tools like Zapier and, you know, things like that, would sort of assist to take the load off of that person. And we still see a lot of opportunity there. But, you know, it's always easier said than done, you know.

So I think that long term, the you know, how I would think about measuring the impact, surprise, surprise, digital publishers, thinking, Well, how many people are going to read it, right? I mean, I think that's the first thing that we'd be looking for.

I mean, I think the first thing we would do right is you would potentially have almost like a news desk dedicated to this kind of coverage. I mean, I think, you know, I remember sitting in one of Emad's focus groups for their research project. And, you know, I think I've thought of a lot about, right? Is how people in, you know, flood prone areas, hurricane prone areas, they think about these events. And, you know, something that's striking to me is, you know, a grown up in southern Louisiana, I think I just got used to was hurricane seasons and hurricane guides, right? And.

I think a lot of our project was just like, Well, is there a way to develop a similar habit around understanding flood risk? Everybody and their mom in southern Louisiana can sort of talk about, like, some very basic things about hurricane science, right? Like they can tell you what's the difference between different categories, how often they hit the Gulf, etc. You know, ocean warming and the impact that that might have on intensity of storms, and these are things that people can just talk about casually, but don't necessarily have the same vocabulary for when it comes to flooding.

And so building a news environment that does something similar, right, like, you know, maybe you have a reporter whose job it is is to kind of report specifically around flood risk and its various impacts, right around like housing and development and all those kinds of things would be really powerful. And then being able to use it to use a tool like what we've developed with you well, that has scientific merit, that knows what it's knows, and is candid about what it doesn't know, I think, is a really powerful thing, and something that I think we can really build from long term.

The key being, we've got to have somebody to do it, you know, and somebody who's dedicated to doing it day in, day in, day out, which is a challenge with any partnership we've been involved in, right? There's always that space between the partners that a third person should theoretically occupy. And I think though, on the other way of looking at that, though, is that that's an opportunity that means that there's a gap that you can plug, and if you did, you'd have something really powerful.

Thank you for having us.