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To My Colleagues Covering #CoronaScare


To colleagues working in their newsrooms or on the field in these days of Corona scare… To those comrades who will not or cannot isolate or quarantine themselves… To associates who will tomorrow again “cover” Parliament, the offices on Raisina Hill, or various hospitals, or other ‘beats’…

From my hardworking young friend @IamNaveenKapoor handle

 I may not be anywhere there, but my thoughts, my wishes, my applause are always for you, with you…

When countrymen open their newspapers, switch on to a news channel or log onto a news-site, they will know what they want to know because you were there to source out what you know they will want to know… When such calamities strike, editors scramble reporters to ground zero. And this time, it’s ground zero everywhere!

What is worse – and what I can understand – your beat, your daily reporting will become tougher and tougher as the “society is walled off”.

And the times aren’t good for either news or for the media industry as a whole. Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) Editor and Publisher, Kyle Pope, while writing on how to cover a fast-moving pandemic, mentioned: “the coronavirus, in addition to being terrifyingly contagious, acts as an unusually merciless magnifying glass, showing the flaws in our politics, our healthcare system, our social safety net. And in our media.”

As I was reading somewhere, Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, has noted that “the virus has the potential to pull the bottom out of an advertising market that has been tough on many media companies for years”.

A report by Sonam Saini on exchange4media.com says: “With coronavirus forcing most Indians to stay indoors as part of the preventive measures, TV viewing is set to scale along with other forms of ‘in-house’ entertainment. The lack of outdoor activities coupled with work-from-home is set to give the television industry higher viewership numbers but will it also translate into higher ad revenue is the question of the hour. 

Also, with production houses halting shooting to abide by the health advisories the new challenge is if broadcasters will be able to sustain their flow of content.”

In the same report, there are apprehensions that… “However, those watching the markets have sounded a word of caution. Industry experts, we spoke to, said the coronavirus threat is expected to hit the markets further and this in turn will affect ad revenues too.” Also hit hard will be many media houses that earn considerable revenue from organising events – creating a kind of marketplace for others too – due to the “no-crowding” safety measure.

A CJR newsletter observed: “A number of alternative weeklies and regional papers in the US have cut staff dramatically and in some cases shut down completely, moves that they say have been driven by a decline in ad revenue following the coronavirus pandemic.”

In the same article, titled “The challenges of reporting on a global pandemic”, Mathew Ingram writes, “Schools and restaurants are closed, stock markets are plummeting, and millions of people are trying to navigate a new world of social distancing and self-isolation. As the number of those infected and hospitalized continues to mount, journalists are working overtime to try to help the public understand the crisis.

CJR’S Jon Allsop has seen lots of impressive coverage, including stories on the impact on vulnerable, low-income workers    “… the implications of it are massive and dire, and there is no end in sight to its dominance over everything else,” she says. “

We have to wait and see the future but what do journalists do now? Kyle Pope writes, “The journalism that matters is local. We’ve known for a while that the loss of good local news outlets not only imperils a working democracy, but leaves a void in thoughtful journalism. We have too many (cheap) talking heads and not enough (expensive) concrete and useful information. This crisis reinforces that.”

An exchange4media.com headline that really grabbed my attention said: “Global print media gets Coronavirus jitters, Indian newspapers battle it out”. A blurb added” “Even as a number of global magazines & newspapers are looking at going completely digital due to the coronavirus crisis, newspapers in India have been delivering papers at the doorsteps every morning”.

And – this is why I hail my comrades – Tasmayee Laha Roy writes in the report, “Cut to India. Newspapers go to print on time. Every day. Coronavirus or not.

The publication of print media in the country has never been put on hold. Deadlines stay intact and so does employee safety.”
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