Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: . The UK is traditionally known for its wet climate, but droughts are also relatively commonplace. Using newspapers as a medium of public communication, this study explores the timing and content of media coverage of droughts in England. We constructed a corpus from newspaper articles related to droughts in England to analyse the temporal alignment of media coverage with meteorological anomalies and, using topic modelling, the emerging topics covered by drought-related articles in newspapers. Our findings reveal that media coverage generally coincides with meteorological drought, but the inverse case is not always the case, suggesting additional conditions to generate media coverage (e.g., seasonality, precedent condition of long-term precipitation shortage). Dominant topics include the status of water deficiency and weather forecasts, the mismanagement of water companies and the enforcement of hosepipe bans, highlighting current challenges in water management practices in England.
Authors: Inhye Kong, Jan Seibert, Ross S. Purves
Institution: University of Zurich
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,725
Funder: Universität Zürich
Award: G6771601482
OpenAlex ID: W6892499365