Reconstruction and adaptation in times of a contagious crisis: a case of African newsrooms’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This is a cross-national comparative study of how media in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa reconstructed their operations in response to Covid-19 global pandemic. The study is grounded in a qualitative research design that uses semi-structured interviews with journalists from Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. The study investigated how news operations, newsroom cultures, news gathering, and news dissemination practices were impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Informed by the sociology of news production theoretical lens, the study noted that journalists and editors were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic which ensured they change some journalistic practices. The findings of this study reveal that journalists suffered traumatic experiences such as job losses, covid-19 related illness and fatalities. At a regulatory level, findings confirm the perennial challenges with media freedoms in the region with South Africa remaining a lone outlier. Lastly, interviews with journalists further demonstrate that newsrooms have had to maximise digital affordances for news gathering and dissemination as old revenue streams dried up. As a result, print media scaled back in its operations as a response to containing the spread of the virus.