Making Sense of Pandemic-Induced Changes in Journalism and Beyond

Abstract

There is no question that it is crucial to document, as precisely and thoroughly as we can, how this arguably unprecedented global crisis has changed the way news is produced, diffused, and consumed, with what effects. By critically analyzing our collective experiences of and responses to the global health crisis as related to journalism, which range from data-driven news production, to existing and emergent threats to press freedom, to misinformation and conspiracy theories, to individuals’ news use as well as news avoidance, this special issue highlights the key issues in journalism and journalism scholarship in times of extremely high epistemic uncertainty and ambiguity. After briefly reviewing several noteworthy aspects of the research presented in the current issue, I propose several directions in which future research can extend, refine, and advance the findings as well as research agendas reported herein.

Keywords:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• dark platform
• data journalism
• digital newsroom
• press freedom
• news frame
• news habit

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Institute of Communication Research at Seoul National University, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5B8070398).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).