Through their work, the news media has attempted to hold governments to account and translate public health information into a format that audiences can make sense of and apply to their daily lives.

As further waves take hold around much of the world, this presents an opportunity to take stock of earlier reporting and showcase some of the fresh approaches newsrooms have used in covering COVID-19.

With the pandemic moving into its next phase, I hope that these examples offer inspiration and affirmation for journalists, as they continue to explore new ways to cover this crisis.

New products and approaches

Many news media outlets saw record levels of traffic and engagement in the early stages of the outbreak. Large audiences were hungry for information about this rapidly-changing situation.

As the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers…

In 2021, the media platform with the highest weekly reach in the United States is audio. Data published last month by Nielsen revealed that radio — just one component of this medium — reaches 88% of U.S. adults each week, ahead of smartphone apps (85%) and TV (80%).

And our national love of audio isn’t just confined to traditional radio consumption. The growth of podcasts, and emergence of audio in other places, like social networks, means that the time we spend with this type of content continues to grow and evolve.

This creates opportunities for newsrooms of all shapes and…

At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020, 84.8% of the world’s students — the equivalent of some 1.48 billion children and young people — were dealing with school closures. One year on, nearly half the world’s students remain affected by schools that are partially or fully closed, UNESCO reports, leaving a question mark dangling over the prospects of more than a billion children who’ve lost vital learning to COVID-19.

Technology has played a pivotal role in keeping education afloat over the past year as well as helping students, teachers and parents adjust to these new, pandemic-induced realities.

“It’s a paradox that, as more and more people realise they need high-quality factual information to navigate the crisis, the business models that sustain that information are collapsing,” the non-profit International Media Support (IMS), explains.

“The global economic shutdown has severely reduced the advertising revenues that many media outlets depend on.”

As a result, “worldwide, countless independent news providers are being forced to scale down, lay off reporters or close altogether”.

This financial backdrop is just one factor shaping the response of news organisations and journalists to the pandemic, alongside issues such as navigating the ‘infodemic’ and frequent encouragements on…

Writing in Foreign Policy at the end of June 2020, Sushma Raman, executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, reflected on “the global deterioration of press freedom”, adding that “an increasing number of attacks on the media have come in places where press freedom was once enshrined”.

One of the primary reasons for attacking, or threatening, journalists is to try and influence their reporting. As Gavin Rees, director of Dart Centre Europe, has explained:

“The basic headline is that if somebody is threatening you, they are trying to get into your head…

The picture painted by Kathy Katella, a senior clinical writer for Yale School of Medicine, will be familiar to almost everyone.

“You read about COVID-19. Then, you read some more. Then, you read things that contradict other things… COVID-19 is worrisome enough, so when you add in the tsunami of information surrounding it — and whiplash accompanying it — it can wear you down. If you’re overwhelmed, you’re not alone.”

This dynamic led to the WHO acknowledging that the outbreak, and response to it, has resulted in “an over-abundance of information — some accurate and some not — that makes…

It is now a decade since the Arab Spring, a period of upheaval and turmoil that continues to have repercussions across the region.

Although its importance has arguably been overstated, social media played an important role in contributing to the organisation of protests and enabling outside journalists to get a sense of what was happening on the ground.

As someone who has been tracking this scene in a series of annual reports since 2012, here are ten ways that social media has changed in the Middle East in the decade since the Arab Spring.

1. Facebook falls out of fashion (but not everywhere)

At the time, the biggest social…

The Abraham Accords, a series of normalisation deals signed last year between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), offer the chance to galvanise the technology sector across the region.

The deals signed last year established diplomatic relations between the countries and also opened the way for more business opportunities between the long-estranged states.

The Accords were “a historical and timely breakthrough, and a turning point for the Middle East region,” says Abdulla Al Hamed, managing partner at digital transformation and consultancy company INTERMID and chairman of the Bahrain Internet Society. …