From a coronavirus hot spot to police brutality and street protests in Minneapolis, CNN national correspondent Miguel Marquez has covered the major stories upending American life during the first half of 2020.
Freelancers are at the core of journalism as we know it. But as the COVID-19 pandemic leads to budget cuts at almost every level, freelancers are struggling to find work. Without the support of an organization behind them, many freelancers have become responsible for their own safety and wellbeing, at a time when both are being threatened.
Collaborating with communities and rethinking business models are among the key steps journalists and newsrooms should take as they struggle to persist in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, three top editors said.
Reporting from China has long been a challenge, but with the country at the epicenter of a global pandemic, information control and censorship appear to be on the rise, said South China Morning Post reporter Linda Lew.
“Every interview—whether it’s with a victim of COVID-19 or the president of your country—is a fight for control,” said Julian Sher, a veteran TV documentary writer and director, during an ICFJ webinar Tuesday.
As many communities move from urging people to stay at home to opening for business, the U.S., one of the world’s wealthiest countries, is not prepared to meet the challenge, an economist and an epidemiologist said during an ICFJ webinar Thursday. “When the United States is handling this relatively poorly, you look at other countries that are less affluent than we are, and definitely have concern for them,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University.
With COVID-19 dominating the news and crippling communities across the world, we at ICFJ are doing everything we can to help journalists provide information that can mean the difference between life and death. I want to highlight how our ICFJ Knight Fellows are leading the way. They are providing resources from webinars with regional experts to journalism safety tips to business strategies to bolster the bottom line.
Before the arrival of COVID-19, the state of the news industry was already precarious: revenues were down and news organizations were folding. Across the world, news deserts have become more commonplace.
The effects of COVID-19 are already being framed as an “extinction event” for journalism, causing dozens of news outlets to collapse around the world. Tens of thousands of newsroom jobs have been lost or reshaped by the pandemic.
