Braczkowski, A., Holden, M.H., O'Bryan, C., Choi, C-Y., Gan, X., Beesley, N., Gao, Y., Allan, J., Tyrrell, P., Stiles, D., Brehony, P., Meney, R., Brink, H., Takashina, N., Lin, M-C., Lin, H-Y., Rust, N., Salmo III, S.G., Watson, J.E.M., Kahumbu, P., Maron, M., Possingham, H.P. & Biggs, D.

Alexander Braczkowski, Matthew H Holden, Christopher O'Bryan, Chi‐Yeung Choi, Xiaojing Gan, Nicholas Beesley, Yufang Gao, James Allan, Peter Tyrrell, Daniel Stiles, Peadar Brehony, Revocatus Meney, Henry Brink, Nao Takashina, Ming‐Ching Lin, Hsien‐Yung Lin, Niki Rust, Severino G. Salmo III, James EM Watson, Paula Kahumbu, Martine Maron, Hugh P Possingham, Duan Biggs (Accepted 2018) Reach and messages of the world's largest ivory burn. (): .

10.1111/cobi.13097

Recent increases in ivory poaching have depressed African elephant populations. Successful enforcement has led to ivory being stockpiled. Stockpile destruction is becoming increasingly popular, and most destruction has occurred in the last five years. Ivory destruction is intended to send a strong message against ivory consumption, both in promoting a taboo on ivory use and catalyzing policy change. However, there has been no effort to establish the distribution and extent of media reporting on ivory destruction events globally. We analyze media coverage across eleven important nation states of the largest ivory destruction event in history (Kenya, 30 April 2016). We used a well‐accepted online media crawling tool and key language translations to search online and print newspapers. We found most online news on the ivory burn came from the US (81% of articles), while print news was dominated by Kenya (61% of articles). We subjected online articles from five key countries and territories to content analysis and found 86–97% of all online articles reported the burn as a positive conservation action, while between 4–50% discussed ivory burning as having a negative impact on elephant conservation. Most articles discussed law enforcement and trade bans as effective for elephant conservation. There was more relative search interest globally on the 2016 Kenyan ivory burn than any other in five years. Our study is the first attempt to track the spread of media around an ivory burn and is a case study in tracking the effects of a conservation‐marketing event.