This is how you cover The Biggest News of the Year: Lessons from COVID-19

Using the coronavirus pandemic as an example of a large-scale disaster, this session will explore how you set up your newsroom, how you deploy resources, and how you innovate and create under pressure to engage, build, and educate your audience during a time of crisis.

As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, news organizations are tasked with delivering information, holding public officials accountable, and informing an audience that is at times reluctant, anxious, and seeking comfort.

Doing this requires a massive overhaul of day-to-day newsroom structure, a rapid assessment of resources and how to deploy them effectively, and a large-scale push to be creative, engaging, and reassuring in how we deliver news. Not to mention that at least with coronavirus, everyone is suddenly working from home.

Using COVID-19 as a case study, this session will get down into the nitty gritty – what makes a good war room? How do you manage your talent ? How do you innovate in delivering news? How do you build audience and brand loyalty? And how do you care for your employees during such stress?

We’ll talk to national, local, and international news organizations about what worked, what didn’t, and should this ever happen again, what lessons would they take forward. This session is for managers, editors, young journalists, audience builders, and the information innovators who drive change within newsrooms.

Every few years, the news ecosystem weathers a major storm. This pandemic is the storm of 2020. Regardless of where we are pandemic-wise in October, this retrospective/introspective will hopefully seed or amend the disaster coverage plan of every newsroom in attendance.

Suggested Speaker(s)

  • Megha Satyanarayana
    Senior Editor, Chemical & Engineering News
  • TBD (Local News)