MIA MALAN: Eight lessons Covid taught me about journalism

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If you try to cover everything, you’ll end up reporting on nothing. This and seven more lessons from inside a Covid-19 newsroom via Bhekisisa_MG’s miamalan.

People are, however, unlikely to trust media reports if journalists frequently get things wrong, even if these are small details. To reduce the possibility of mistakes, we bent an unwritten journalistic “code” during Covid: we asked scientists and other experts to check what we wrote when we were unsure if we had understood things correctly. Before Covid, we’d send interviewees only their quotes, not large parts of stories, to prevent them from interfering editorially.

Our Covid coping strategy taught me an interesting lesson: if you consistently report science or policies accurately during a pandemic, or ask for help to ensure accuracy, the experts you interview rarely attempt to exercise editorial control, even if you give them the gap. Most simply don’t have the time to do so, but their goal is also almost always the same as yours: to get accurate information out to the public.

And building relationships of trust with scientists and policymakers leads to preferential access to information for reporters, especially in the case of sensitive data such as — data that officials are slow to release out of fear that it might get sensationalised and criticised. In turn, media consumers’ confidence in journalists with such access increases, because they’re able to consistently provide them with numbers and information that others can’t. 6.

There has been an online revolution that has completely changed who has access to printing presses, and social media platforms, for one, have become essential publishing tools. Twitter threads, for instance, are now stories in themselves. Threads can do many things website stories can’t: they travel faster, allow for quicker interaction with consumers, and they reach more targeted audiences .

 

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