Droughts and Media: when and what do the newspapers talk about the droughts in England?

Abstract. The UK is traditionally known for its wet climate, but droughts are also relatively commonplace. Using newspapers as a medium of public communication, this study explores the timing and content of media coverage of droughts in England. We constructed a corpus from newspaper articles related to droughts in England to analyse the temporal alignment of media coverage with meteorological anomalies and, using topic modelling, the emerging topics covered by drought-related articles in newspapers. Our findings reveal that media coverage generally coincides with meteorological drought, but the inverse case is not always the case, suggesting additional conditions to generate media coverage (e.g., seasonality, precedent condition of long-term precipitation shortage). Dominant topics include the status of water deficiency and weather forecasts, the mismanagement of water companies and the enforcement of hosepipe bans, highlighting current challenges in water management practices in England.