How’s media reporting Covid-19? With a look back and a look forward
As Covid-19 turbo-charges the disruption of the business model, it’s forcing news media in the Asia-Pacific to rethink what communities need and value, Christopher Warren writes.
Reporting Covid-19 is forcing the world’s media to look back as much as look forward. Look forward: with new innovative ways to use the power of information to do the job our communities expect of us right now. Look back: Remember journalism as a service that binds the community?
Better: can we put the two together? Can we innovate around journalism as a service?
That’s where the most effective — the most useful — Covid-19 journalism is happening. It uses innovation to meet its readers, its listeners, its viewers where it finds them, renewing tools that identify just what information the audience wants and — in a pandemic — needs to know.
Across the Asia-Pacific, media are responding with Covid-specific products, like newsletters, micro-sites, podcasts and videos and also drawing on their communities though user-generated content to tell the stories of their own experiences of living through the pandemic as doctors, activists, families of infected patients, ordinary people explaining how they’re getting by in a time of social isolation.It’s meant refashioning service journalism along the three axes of usefulness, community building and entertainment.
Once upon a time, both providing information and building community was what media did (or thought it did), particularly newspapers, who considered themselves journals of record, with the day to day information needed to live your life, work at your job and act as a citizen.
Now, search makes disaggregated information more accessible, but it can lose the important context that journalistic story-telling brings. Social media binds communities but is inherently unreliable. When communities lack reliable information — and information is polluted with bad faith actors (including governments) — social sharing is more likely to drive fear and confusion than build community solidarity.
With attention dominated by search and social landscape, journalism has focused on where it best adds value: holding power to account. Critical still, as governments and authorities stumble in the face of the shifting challenge of the pandemic, but is it the job — or the only job — our audiences want or need right now?
The weaker the government structures — and consequently the weaker the government’s public health response — the more critical the role of the media. It’s particularly important for on-line media where the old joke “if it’s wrong, it’s not wrong for long” can be turned into a powerful tool for making sure they are providing only the most up-to-date understanding of the pandemic.
The conventions of journalistic practice are shaped by the demand for telling what’s new, what’s changed today, moulding it into a flow that makes sense of events. That helps tell some of the Covid story. But not enough. Where the science of the virus and the public health responses are contested (fairly or no), it’s a story that moves in jerks, that doubles back on itself. Key agreed facts can be overturned in a moment.
Media have had to move beyond integrating Covid-19 reporting into their day to day coverage like any other breaking story. It demands expertise that many traditional media have lost, and respect for the expertise of others. It calls us to understand that this story is being lived in a profound way by our audiences. They bring that personal understanding to our own reporting.
It requires a humility of doubt in place of certainty.
Product innovation
The most evident innovation has been in product: media have built Covid-19 specific products, like micro-sites, specialist newsletters and, in some cases such as Stuff in New Zealand, Covid-19 focussed podcasts. Second, reflecting the social responsibility of the media in a pandemic, most have positioned their Covid-19 coverage outside their paywall.
In a product pivot, the Asahi Shimbun turned its planned reporting of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics into reporting on the pandemic, interwoven with the will-they-won’t-they happen speculation. In one example, they presented message conversation style to show the contrast between public statements and private briefings.r
Covid is a data story
In the journalism, itself, innovation has called for a multi-layered response: At first layer, Covid-19 is a data story, with publicly measured data series: tests, cases, hospitalisations and deaths. It’s a pandemic, so it lends itself to national and international comparisons.
Most famous has been the Financial Times coronavirus trajectory chart which enabled a ready comparison of the growth of, first, cases and, then, deaths, country by country. It provided a powerful benchmark for citizens to assess the effectiveness of the response of their own government. Simple in retrospect, but it was a quick application of the data to the big journalistic question: what do people need to know right now as citizens?
Indonesia’s Katadata used its data expertise to shape the Indonesian understanding of the story and to encourage all the country’s leading media to corporate in ensuring a consistency in reporting facts. New Zealand’s The Spinoff used data visualisation to explain infection rates and the impact of social distancing.
Taiwan’s United Daily News used interactive infographics to connect and trace each cluster within the island. Tempo.co used large data sets of case counts, Google mobility indexes and rates in Jakarta to test the effectiveness of the government mandated Large Scale Social Distancing Measures.
Getting the numbers right is harder than you think. Although the raw data is (usually) available from one public health source or another, it’s a journalistic convention to make figures look as bad (or as good) as they can to emphasise the bigger story. Right now, that’s a bad heuristic. Instinctively, journalists have recognised that the power of data is enough. To go beyond adds panic without context.
Of course, data is socially constructed. Definitions have caused their own challenges. Most notoriously there’s the often-confused distinctions between deaths with the virus and deaths caused by the virus, a distinction used to conceal, not illuminate. Who’s going to keep data both open and relevant? Journalists, of course.
Covid is a people story
At the next layer, it’s a story about people. Not the institutions or governments that usually generate “news”. The disadvantaged groups and minorities are worst affected, both by the pandemic and by public health responses. When India’s lock-down forced millions to return to home villages, The Wire turned to photo essays on-line to illustrate the drama of the exodus.
As individual experiences tell the stories of sickness, lockdowns and social distancing, media are turning to user-generated content.
The Philippines has been one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, with the most cases in South-East Asia (about 250,000 in early September). It’s also had a weak public health information system creating a profound information deficit.
Leading start-up website Rappler has refashioned its user-generated content section, Detours, into “Detours from Home” to create a safe space where readers could share their personal stories about life in quarantine. They’ve now sourced a supporting partner to turn these stories into a podcast series voiced by local actors.
PumaPodcast decided to throw its resources to look at the narratives, stories, and personal experiences of Filipinos.They launched Covid Diaries, to take listeners beyond the headlines with diverse spoken stories from oridinary people as well as and expert explainers to fill the information gap. It included stories of hope: a teacher using social media to mobilise relief efforts; an overseas-based construction worker donating to Covid relief despite his salary being on hold. And it included stories of struggle: A Filipina lawyer in Italy, isolating alone; a doctor forced to see patients in a parking lot to decrease risk of infection.
Its Covid Diaries series has been played over 1.6 million times and been picked up by other local media.
We don’t know what we don’t know to ask
At a further layer, it’s a humbling story. We can’t be sure what we truly know about the virus. Even the science is uncertain. That means we can’t be certain about what our audiences want to know.
To find out, The Philippines Inquirer set up the Covid-19 Info Desk as a multi-platform initiative which ran for 101 days until the end of June. Readers could submit questions through email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Viber and the Disqus comment section of the masthead’s website.. The editorial team researched and answered 10–12 questions every day, totalling 620 questions out of the 2,600 submitted.
Similarly, in Singapore, the Straits Times launched the interactive platform AskST. They received more than 5,000 questions in less than four months, ranging from health and science to business and jobs as well as education and travel. Answers were published in a Q+A format.
Conclusion
As Covid-19 wrenches societies out of the comfort of the route they thought they were on, journalists and media have been expected to meet the needs of the moment. The best of media — both traditional and start up — have seized the moment to rethink the job they’re doing, to understand the shifting needs and wants of their audience, and in response, innovate their journalism.
