Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

“There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

Read the full article here.