Media Innovation During a Pandemic

The inaugural episode of the Journalism Breakthroughs podcast discusses how the media coped with the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 virus. Innovation in journalism allowed media outlets to survive the pandemic. We talked to Robert Nemeth, who works as Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Media, Data and Society, walked us through a series of innovative ways of responding to the Covid crisis he collected in a series of four articles published on the CMDS website.  Then, we discussed with John Masuku, a journalist from Zimbabwe, a CMDS fellow and an old friend of our Center, about the situation of journalists in his country and how much they have the energy and resources to deal with the effects of a pandemic. Finally, we approached some of the structural issues that made journalism even more vulnerable during the pandemic, with Kate Coyer a Research Affiliate with CMDS and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.Read John's article on how a media NGO in Zimbabwe changed the narrative on COVID-19 here.Original music for this episode was composed by András Simongáti-Farquhar.Photo credit: Kovid Bhushan Pathak.