MediaShift gives a recap of how the news media served their audience during the California wildfires. Here is one perspective, from Rebecca Coates Nee, a former broadcaster who teaches online journalism at San Diego State:
“I think [the local media] lost sight of their mission, which is to inform the residents, especially those of us who evacuated and only had the Internet to get local information,” she told me. “The best thing would have been to have links to the info by neighborhood…I think [the media] did the best they could, but if they just could have taken a step back and asked, ‘Who is your audience? What do they want to know?’ I think they were just putting out updates from the county, but that didn’t apply to me. I just wanted to know what happened to my neighborhood, and find that information really easily.”