The Newsworthiness of Brazilian Distress: A Peak Analysis on Time Series of International Media Attention to Disasters in Brazil
For disaster response researchers and media analysts, it provides a systematic method to understand the drivers of international news coverage of Brazilian disasters, though the findings are specific to one country and media source.
This study analyzes 2,000 news articles about Brazilian fires and landslides in German newspapers (2000-2024) using time series segmentation to detect event peaks, finding that only a subset of disasters in national and global databases receive international media attention.
Media coverage influences disaster response, yet the drivers of international media attention to local events remain unevenly understood. Brazil offers a compelling case: some of its natural and technological disasters occasionally hit the international headlines. However, systematic analyses of what makes these events be discussed abroad are still missing. Addressing this gap requires representative, validated and country-specific news datasets. This paper presents a peak analysis of 2k news about Brazilian fires and landslides in German newspapers from 2000 to 2024. Using time series segmentation to detect news event peaks, we examine the extent to which they can be temporally aligned with observations in national and global disaster databases.