The sunlight through the ash
A few brighter spots in the information environment around L.A.'s fires.
On days like these, the readers make their eternal return to the writers: Mike Davis, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion and their liturgies of Los Angeles at the end of the world. “The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself,” as Didion said of the Santa Anas. “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.” The ash has gotten thicker this morning, faintly falling on the face of my iPhone like cancerous snowflakes. I briefly forgot my N-95 when I stepped outside. I realized, on the sidewalk, that I was filling my lungs with the remnants of somebody’s home.
Sometimes you can ignore a crisis, but a crisis won’t ignore you. Here’s where I confess I was unfaithful this morning and turned to a New Yorker, Don DeLillo. “News of disaster is the only narrative people need,” DeLillo wrote in “Mao II” about the waning power of writers to alter culture. “The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before — what? I don’t know.” That was in 1991. In 2025, we are now squarely in “don’t know” territory.
Yesterday I wrote pretty harshly about the experience of being a civilian digital news consumer outside a newsroom for the first time, trying to follow information about the wildfires unfolding around me in Los Angeles. These are times when the need for quality news is at its indisputable greatest. People I know have lost their homes; others have fled and many more have packed their bags, uncertain if they’ll need to flee at a moment’s notice, sometimes confused about the difference between a Red Flag warning and an evacuation order.
Well, a lot of people in charge of the information on the private-sector side are doing an awful job. Elon Musk would be tweeting via Starlink about DEI and the captain being a “pedo guy” if he were riding the Titanic as it met the iceberg; platforms reflect the priorities of their operators, and X abandoned its breaking-news roots to become a right-wing opinion-formation machine. Patrick Soon-Shiong, not one of our more important billionaires in the grand scheme of things but the owner of the Los Angeles Times nonetheless, has accordingly been flogging the as-seen-on-X nonsense about L.A. fire and police budgets, now abetted by his hapless daughter, last seen claiming her dad had averted a Kamala Harris endorsement because of Gaza (ha ha ha ha ha).
It’s embarrassing, but this is the reality. Your beaten-down legacy journalist’s job this week will partly consist of cleaning up after the people with the money. And it will be a public service nonetheless. The job would just be easier if the vectors of bullshit were located outside the house.
But even though we’ve evolved into a risk-shifted information environment, where it’s the consumer’s responsibility to discover whether they’re about to die, there have been a couple bright spots that I omitted in yesterday’s newsletter.
First, commercial broadcast: I left these folks out because, candidly, as a cord-cutting Millennial, I don’t own a TV or a radio in my home. The broadcast work I’ve seen, delivered schizophrenically via social platforms like TikTok, has been professional, vivid and moving.
The moments that have made me feel the most hope have come via traditional broadcast work, like CBS News encountering the beatnik trombonist who reached for his Keroauc when fleeing the flames. All of Los Angeles must have cheered when the NBC LA live broadcast captured some TOP GUN fire pilot delivering a perfect payload that doused an entire fire line in the Hollywood Hills last night. On one of the stations — I’ve lost which one — a local Palisades handyman spoke into the camera to let residents know by name which one of their houses had burned down. NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff reported outside his birth home in the Pacific Palisades, reduced to the foundations, while on the phone with his mom.
On the data side, the breakout star of this disaster has been the nonprofit Watch Duty wildfire app. Watch Duty, founded in 2021, combines an approachable interface with publicly available fire data and some modest human reporting to give the essentials on area fires, evacuation zones, wind direction and air quality.
A lot of this data is available elsewhere — I’m a user of the L.A. Times’ California Fires map — but Watch Duty has upped the game for everyone on the user experience side. My old colleague and friend Wendy Lee has a profile of the the Watch Duty team at the L.A. Times here. They added 600,000 users in one day and are available in 22 states.
Watch Duty is not a replacement for the broader devastation of local newsrooms locally in L.A. and across California that’s dragging us all down right now. But the app is an improvement on the data-centric side of understanding the disaster. I’m rooting for them.
Stay safe out there, friends.
I'm in Eagle Rock, just south of the evacuation zones. It's Thursday and I'm still not unpacked. Yesterday morning, we were ready to leave, put the cats and dogs in the back of one car, everything else in the Vanagon. But the red glow and the embers never came over the hill. So we're OK. Not so the uncomfortably many friends and connections who are suddenly homeless. So next step is to figure out how best to help. The white ash dots the backyard, along with oak branches and debris from the winds. The air is still thick. The sunlight is eery mustard yellow. Maybe I'll unpack now. But Mt. Wilson is still burning...
Local TV (antenna, cable, web, or YT) has been a godsend. Kudos for catching the Soboroff broadcast; I'm speechless/wordless... Quibble about some of the coverage and the tone, but they've been on the air around the clock. They broke the Runyon fire last night and the Studio City flareup and were looking down from their choppers as both fires got doused. They were on Sunset in the Palisades as the Chase bank burned in real time over the course of an hour. Blah Blah local talking heads no more: these familiar faces have been on the front lines and backing it up in-studio for the last 72 hours. It's heroic. There should be one big special Pulitzer for all of them together.
I feel ditto. I was not going to get reliable info from my normal online resources & the LA times is awful in a crisis, so at first I was in despair for our information ecosystem. But I figured out, for the first time, how to stream the local news & they were outstanding (extra props to KCAL). And Watch Duty (culled from local & federal govt & infrastructure resources, I assume) has been a literal lifesaver. It may be too early to make this assessment, but I also feel very good about how our govt has communicated with us & how organized the evacuation alerts have been. I'm not even mad I got a boil water alert in error from the LAFD.