The disaster cycle and the narrative arc: The implications of storytelling for DRR-informed journalism

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.