Spates look like a recurring disruption for riverside communities. This threat gets all the more media attention as spates entail flood and consequently damage. Despite biases, newspapers are useful to study hazards, vulnerability, risks and disasters. This article aims at investigating potentialities and constraints of textual data sources in order to analyse spatial and temporal variability and different public perceptions towards environmental issues. Media coverage is tackled thanks to a content analysis and a textual data analysis. The sample is structured to produce newsworthy risk maps and to evaluate the diachronic aspects. Spates, damage and crisis managements reveal the population attitudes towards a multifunctional river. They involve solidarities and conflicts in space and time perspectives. Because of the increasing of Web newspapers databases which can be free or not, we have more and more access to textual resources. Nevertheless, newspapers in paper format offer more information than the different Web sites.
