An article has been on top of my local news feed for about a week, about a fire in Dark Canyon. It identifies Dark Canyon as being 8 miles from Cloudcroft.
KTSM Staff. (2020, Aug. 10). Firefighters battling Dark Canyon fire near Cloudcroft. KTSM.
There are two problems with this article that make it a media disaster. First is that it is the only article there is out there, about the fire, and has been for five days. So this is not KTSM's fault; they at least got a story no one else got.
But the problem that irks me is that it identifies two different Dark Canyons; one is north of Capitan, and the other one is eight miles from Cloudcroft. I could tell by reading the article that the fire could not be in both places, as you can't be eight miles from Cloudcroft and northwest of Capitan at the same time. But I didn't know where the fire was. The headline identified it as near Cloudcroft; the article mentioned both Cloudroft and Capitan as they were the same.
After a few days local people confirmed for me that the fire was near Capitan, not Cloudcroft. Facebook turned out to be a better source of information than local media, the writers of whom did not really know the difference between Cloudcroft and Capitan. We have no media here. Alamogordo didn't even pick up the story.
Maybe the fire was a nothing, and didn't really matter. It is, after all, rainy season, so most of us are taking a breath and enjoying the fact that one cigarette is not going to burn down the entire forest, at least not at the moment. But we're a very fire-wary culture, and a headline that says someone is battling a fire near Cloudcroft, most of us are going to read the article.
Too bad. We could use a media outlet around here.
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