“No one wants to be sinking”: How journalism students are reporting on community-driven responses to the pandemic
Last month, after the University of Georgia campus shut down and all classes moved online, it didn’t take long for Professor Amanda Bright and her colleagues at the school’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication to make a critical decision.
All final projects by graduating seniors would now be anchored in solutions journalism, reporting on responses to COVID-19.
“It was our plan all along to do solutions reporting as part of the final projects,” said Bright, one of several Grady professors who had already been incorporating solutions journalism into their teaching (as of the publication of this post, there are a dozen stories by Grady students in the Solutions Story Tracker maintained by the Solutions Journalism Network).
But the coronavirus was fueling a frenzy of tragedy reporting, and she and her colleagues wanted the students’ work to go beyond the pandemic’s toll, reflecting responses to the swift and drastic changes to both the UG campus and the larger community.
“We felt like solutions journalism was right for the moment,” Bright said. “When the problem is pretty evident to our audience, it’s time to apply those same rigorous reporting skills that we would to the problem to the responses.”
Erica Jackson, a senior in Bright’s multiplatform journalism class, is focusing on the many community efforts underway to backfill a shortage of masks. She said that applying a solutions journalism approach, including seeking evidence of the impact of the response, any insights it might provide for others who might want to replicate it, as well as its limitations, has helped her frame her reporting through the lens of possibility in a time of great despair.
“We are living through this sink-or-swim moment in history, and no one wants to be sinking,” Jackson said. “So people are coming up with creative efforts to swim, and help their community members and neighbors swim as well. It’s been beautiful to be able to report on that.”
Jackson’s reporting includes a description of a local government agency re-employing staff who were furloughed as non-essential workers and paying them their regular wages to sew masks. “People are working crazy hours and working on weekends,” she said. “But it is this incredible time to see how everyone is gathering together to get done what needs to be done.”
The projects Jackson and other students produce in Bright’s class, known as capstones, will be published on Grady Newsource, the student news outlet, where Bright is also digital managing editor. (Update: Jackson’s Capstone was accepted for inclusion in the Story Tracker, where it is now among more than 20 pieces of COVID-19 student journalism.)
Capstones can get ambitious, incorporating audio, video, graphics, photo and longform writing. Changing the content of such a demanding course in the middle of the semester was, arguably, risky, at a time when students were already struggling with the tremendous disruption of having to move out of dorms and adapt to online learning.
But, Bright said, students embraced the chance to shift the pandemic narrative away from the daily death count.
Students feel “gratitude for the ability to do something that gives the community an understanding of what’s going on, and what’s going right, and how people are working together to address problems,” Bright said, “rather than just seeing the numbers roll out every day.”
Yash Bhika, a senior with a passion for sports reporting, said Bright’s course and the solutions journalism approach pushed him to develop his journalistic skills by digging into a non-sports issue he cared about: food insecurity.
Just as Bhika was returning to classes after spring break, his younger sister’s high school shut down. “My first question, when I came back, was how are they still feeding the kids that need to be fed, with classes moving online?”
From that question emerged Bhika’s final project, which focuses on the ongoing efforts by school districts in the region to keep students nourished.
“I’d never done a story on food insecurity,” Bhika said. “I was asking a lot of questions from the people I was interviewing. Questions that might seem basic, but I just wanted to cover my ground in making sure I understand all the aspects that are going into it. That’s really helped me as a reporter, too.”
Bhika’s reporting includes an account of local churches that donated funds to ensure that the students received meals on the weekends, which the district budget didn’t cover.
Bhika said he appreciated “finding stuff like that, where local community members can go in and see where they can help, provide more access to food and just help.” Not to “solve” the problem, Bhika said, “but provide more assistance,” while also reporting on the realization that the response is “not done, just because one person’s doing it.”
Indeed, Bright said, reporting on responses to the pandemic has provided her students with ample lessons in how to craft stories that steer clear of “hero worship” of individuals and instead focus on the work they’re doing and how it might be replicated elsewhere.
The biggest challenge for her students, Bright said, has been finding strong evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness of responses to COVID-19, because both the problem and the efforts to respond are so new. (In light of challenge facing all journalists covering new responses to the pandemic, the Solutions Journalism Network has temporarily adjusted the evidence criteria for such stories under consideration for inclusion in the Story Tracker, creating a special “rapid response” category for coverage of responses to COVID-19).
“The quantitative, data-driven evidence that we would normally implement in this kind of reporting is limited,” Bright said. “So we really have leaned on qualitative evidence to fulfill that need.”
Her plan, she said, is to return to these same stories in the summer and fall, to see whether and how these early responses have held up over time.
“Where the rubber’s going to meet the road with what we’re doing right now is in the next two semesters, going back to these responses, and applying the exact same reporting principles, and seeing how they met that moment. What the limitations were, what was able to grow out of it,” Bright said.
“My guess is that so many community members are touching other community organizations and members in so many unique ways right now,” she said, “is that we’re going to have different coalitions and we’re going to look a lot different on the other side of this.”
Sara Catania is Director of Journalism School Partnerships for the Solutions Journalism Network and teaches journalism at USC Annenberg.
See the COVID19 section of The Whole Story, the Solutions Journalism Network’s Medium blog, for an array of reporting tools and “how to” resources, including information on how to report from home, and a growing collection of local and regional databases on COVID19 cases and deaths by race and ethnicity.
And be sure to visit the Solutions Story Tracker, a curated repository of nearly 9,000 pieces of published solutions journalism from nearly 1,200 news outlets from more than 170 countries. As of this publication of this post, the Tracker includes more than 400 stories on responses to COVID19.
