Journalism has sometimes been a dangerous profession during the pandemic, but there has been real innovation, too.  In this, the third part of our series on Journalism in the Pandemic, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield  considers how Covid 19 has influenced the future of  journalism.

 

Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy and our third podcast in this series on journalism during the pandemic. In this episode we look at the challenges that reporters were just not prepared for. And what are the innovations and changes that come out of the crisis that will be significant for the years ahead.

As the pandemic kicked off, the big challenge for many news organisations was to move their reporting teams to work completely remotely, so there was a massive shifting of equipment to people's homes. Suddenly all sorts of questions were being asked about filing stories in different ways and how to cover stories while reducing risks of infection.

Very few had experience covering a pandemic before. And so there was no obvious formula to follow. Then there were the technical challenges of using new equipment or older equipment differently. At the same time, staff were off sick or on furlough or newsrooms were cut back because of financial pressures.

So what were the toughest obstacles and what are the innovations that might make a difference to how journalism is done in the future? We talked to experts around the world to find out.  First, we went to Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy, and  talked to Laura Silvia Battaglia, the coordinator, and soon to be director of the Catholic University of Milan's journalism school and a journalist herself.   We kicked off by talking about the challenges for the journalism school and its students.

Laura Silvia Battaglia: Here in Milan, we started in February thinking about how could it be possible to cover the pandemic. But we weren't really conscious about the challenges for our profession and also about the risks at the beginning. No one knew exactly what COVID-19 was.

We started thinking about the safety for our students and the risks related to  covering these areas. So the challenges were very significant because we used to send our students around like every reporter does. But at the same time they are students. We told them immediately, to try to keep a distance, the safety distance, how to cover yourself using masks, using face shields.  So we provided all this stuff to our students and we decided  only the people that really wanted to go out for reporting (of course, covering themselves and trying to avoid  any risk and following the rules). So only the people that wanted to they did it and the others who didn't want to go reporting, they would not, they would work at a desk for our publications.

Rachael Jolley: Here is Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the BBC and now director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University on why it was difficult for news organisations to know where to start....

Richard Sambrook: Nobody has had direct experience of reporting a pandemic like this before. So I think it took quite a while for people to understand how to use the statistics, how to use the figures, what to expect from the science and so on as well. That took quite a lot of catching up with even for some of the health specialists. There's the whole question of being remote from the community they serve. Because actually, if anything that we've learned over the last few years is journalism has been too remote needs to get closer to the community. But now the pandemic's come in and now got in the way of that as well. So trying to report the impact, you know, in ways that are still COVID compliant is difficult and chal...