Research keynote speaks on pandemic media consumption
“Journalism and news really does exist within the context of its audience.”
While COVID-19 coverage dominated the news cycle this past year, communicating public health messages effectively continues to challenge journalists, according to Richard Fletcher, senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Fletcher spoke as the research keynote at the Journalism in the Time of Crisis symposium. Fletcher spoke about his research titled ‘Navigating the Infodemic’, which explores where consumers get their news during the pandemic.
The world is facing two adversaries: the pandemic and the “infodemic,” according to Fletcher.
“No one source can reach the whole of a population on its own,” Fletcher said about news organizations in Argentina, Germany, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the US. “Having said that, it’s also clear that news organizations are the most widely used way, or at least were at the beginning of April, of getting news and information about coronavirus in these six countries.”
Watch the whole panel here:
