The power (and limits) of Watch Duty
What we can learn from the success of the L.A. wildfires' breakout info resource.
I’ve mentioned in my last couple newsletters that the nonprofit Watch Duty app — the #1 news app in Apple’s “News” category right now — has been the breakout information resource of the Los Angeles wildfires.
Today, I’ll break down Watch Duty a bit more and talk about what it does really well plus its expected limitations, which are already coming into focus.
First things first: Who Watch Duty is for. Apart from wildfire professionals and other aficionados who will keep the app in regular rotation, Watch Duty’s killer use case for the rest of us is to deliver no-bullshit fire data, mapping and emergency information to civilians suddenly in and around harm’s way. Most people out West spend 98% of their waking lives not thinking about wildfires; Watch Duty is for that 2% of crisis time. I understand the app is also looking at expanding into flood coverage soon and is also thinking about tsunamis and earthquakes.
So the first challenge is that you’re probably going to have a ton of people in a tight geographic area downloading Watch Duty in a big hurry based on word of mouth. And since wildfires (like many disasters) are unpredictable and highly localized phenomena, the most of the most-urgent users being served by Watch Duty are probably going to be using the app for the first time.
So apart from the powerful validation of the word of mouth that comes from consistently being excellent, how do you communicate trust to strangers? Watch Duty loves blasting its 501(c)3 status in your face as soon as you crack it open, trying to side-step anybody’s pre-existing tech politics about Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Andreessen Horowitz or Tim Apple:
This is a nice, crisp intro that hits its spots. We’re a nonprofit; we are emergency professionals and journalists, and here’s the info we reproduce; we’re committed to accuracy and have a strict code of conduct; we are not going to pester you for your email to capture you like other the data-mining apps on your phone.
The Watch Duty code of conduct emphasizes as highlights “No Hearsay,” “No Sensationalization or Editorialization,” “No Personally Identifiable Information” and “Communication & Collaboration,” most critically that “Accuracy is more important than speed” and “Reporters that do not follow our code of conduct will be relieved of duty.”
It is hard to imagine a set of principles more distinct than what you’re going to get from the social media on your phone, which is a hysteria-packed no-consequences zone in any given disaster, despite human beings’ nature to band together in crisis situations when in person. In ethos and professional structure, Watch Duty more closely resembles the legacy newsrooms whose traditional coverage Watch Duty is nicely complementing.
Since I’m a professional snoop, this is where I’d normally root around in Watch Duty’s IRS Form 990 to tell you more about the organization’s financial structure. Since Watch Duty incorporated in 2021, under the name Sherwood Forestry Service, Inc, there’s not great IRS disclosure data available yet. Last week, CEO John Mills told my old L.A. Times colleague Wendy Lee that “Watch Duty has raised $2 million in membership dues, and another $600,000 in donations and grants totaling $3 million, including one from Google.org.” The privacy policy users must agree to talks about the data Watch Duty collects, with promises not to use it for targeted advertising, though naturally those rules could change, particularly if Watch Duty someday does a merger or sells its assets.
The membership dues include a $24.99 premium option that includes a Fire Fighting Flight Tracker in case you’re especially jonesing to watch that fire get its ass kicked in real time, plus a more expensive option for professionals. But Watch Duty is otherwise free and has tons of functionality.
So here’s what the basic Watch Duty interface looks like:
Screenshots don’t quite do justice to the layers of interactivity you get from Watch Duty, which meshes together a lot of publicly available data into one interface. When you click on those evacuation zones around the Palisades, for example, Watch Duty will tell you when the order first came down and when the alert was last updated so you have a sense of whether you’re looking at a stale notice or more late-breaking information.
Probably one of the more confusing layers in Watch Duty’s base presentation is the inclusion of red-flag alerts, which is that huge pink area you see on the map above. Red flag warnings are a projection of higher fire risk — important, but a different category of alert from a similarly-coded evacuation area, for example. (Mea culpa: I don’t know how accessible Watch Duty is for colorblind users.)
But for fidgeters who enjoy fiddling with layers of data, you can add live wildfire cameras for field visuals of some of the fire lines, plus data on wind direction and air quality. The winds will tell you which way the fires might go; the AQI numbers give a gist of how much you might be breathing poison, which is a subject of a lot of concern right now as the immediate danger fades.
Watch Duty sends a ton of push alerts unless you filter them out, which is perhaps a local artifact for me — there are technically multiple separate fire disasters in Los Angeles County right now, not just one fire incident, and so I get updates on each.
One alert that came in as I write this was to alert me about a morning press update from emergency officials, which sent me to the in-app Watch Duty liveblog for the Eaton Fire. A Watch Duty staff reporter assigned to the Eaton fire, Don Zirbel (a retired firefighter! awesome), embedded a link to YouTube for the presser and summarized the presser.
This is classic, down-the-middle, highly accessible meat-and-potatoes events-based news coverage of the type that rarely gets accusations from media-skeptical people about being biased and so forth.
Which gets us to the limitations of Watch Duty when it comes to serving the smoky, tired, and frustrated fire-surviving public.
Disasters are inextricably political events, driven by complex and interlocking factors that can elicit dramatically differing beliefs of blame and helplessness. The course and impact of disasters are influenced by where humans chose to build, where insurers chose to insure, where power lines were built and how well they were maintained, how emergency responders were funded and prepared, when and where officials hand out evacuation orders, all unfolding in the foreground of human-driven climate change believed to be supercharging Mother Nature’s anger.
In other words, Watch Duty’s role as a source of information in the disaster will recede as Angelenos work through what it means that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana when the fires broke out and is taking criticism about her performance from the left and the right since coming home. This is just one among many complex issues we’ll all be processing long after the fires are doused. The time after the fires recede is the domain of traditional legacy journalism.
The single most metaphorically explosive piece of journalism about the L.A. fires came from an interview Fox 11 veteran reporter Gigi Graciette had with Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley about funding. Graciette, pressing a line of questioning over and over and over again about the preventability of the disaster, prompted Crowley to say that she believed the city had failed the fire department.
That’s the power of local television. A basic rule of thumb in media is that the size of your audience is a measure of your leverage in trying to pry information out of public officials and public figures. (Emergency officials should want to build a reliable information-sharing relationship with Watch Duty, given the expected size of its user base in disasters like these and the disasters to come.)
Meanwhile, your local newsroom should probably be thinking about booting up a “Rebuilding” newsletter for the near future that will give the highest-quality possible information about dealing with insurers, disaster aid, taxes, air quality, and reconstruction. I can’t imagine it would be challenging to approach Home Depot or whoever about sponsorships so that the thing is free to read for people who just lost everything. Media donors should probably send their money to projects with less of an obvious commercial nexus.
There will be a need for that kind of information. The losses aren’t even over yet.