Why I Loved This ProPublica Piece on Covering COVID-19
Good morning!
Welcome to the first edition of Are You Engaged? This is not a newsletter about weddings. The title is a bad Jimi Hendrix reference crossed with one of the buzzwords in the industry I work in. This is a weekly newsletter where I share some of my (hopefully interesting!) observations about what publications and media organizations are doing in the realm of audience development, as well as my periodic general thoughts on the media industry.
In this first edition, considering what is going on in the world right now, it would be impossible not to address the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not giving you my thoughts on the crisis, because no one needs those.
Instead, I want to focus on a single article about the crisis, written by someone who knows what they are talking about; an article whose structure I found extremely helpful, as well as intriguing.
Caroline Chen’s piece, “I Lived Through SARS and Reported on Ebola. These Are the Questions We Should Be Asking About Coronavirus.” ran on ProPublica on March 5th. In the scheme of COVID-19 coverage that seems like an eternity ago.
When Chen’s piece published on March 5th, United States citizens, readers, and journalists did not have a firm working knowledge of COVID-19. We still don’t understand everything about COVID-19, but in the past two weeks we have learned a great deal more about how to try and “flatten the curve” to curb the spread of the virus, and state governments have started to take action to hopefully save the lives of thousands of citizens.
But looking back at Chen’s piece, it does a few things well. First, it establishes her background covering other public health crises. For the past month or so, each day there is A LOT of bad or unreliable information passed around about COVID-19. Chen’s piece attempts to cut through that in its headline (“I Lived Through SARS and Reported on Ebola…”) and then in the intro of the story.
After the intro, the article follows the structure of an explainer. Chen walks through helpful sub-heds (sub-headlines) that break the article up, like “Testing Is Still Limited” and “Be Careful with Projections.” Each section catches readers up on essential context around the reporting and information surrounding COVID-19 up to that point.
What makes Chen’s piece unique, is the series of questions she adds at the end of each sub-section. These questions are suggestions specifically for journalists and meant to help them focus their follow-up questions when reporting on COVID-19 to receive more actionable and useful information for their readers.
I thought this was a smart twist on the explainer format and helped tie the story together for its intended audience. From the headline down to Chen’s suggested questions, this article is packaged to speak to industry professionals who read ProPublica. It was a nice piece of service journalism for journalists who are covering a constantly updating and increasingly grave story.
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This week: “Down to Zero” by Joan Armatrading
Joan Armatrading has become something of an underrated/overlooked singer-songwriter from the 1970s. (Note: I’ll probably talk a lot about the 70s in this space.) “Down to Zero” is the lead song off her self-titled third album. I was obsessed with it about 5 or 6 years ago and somehow it fell out of my rotation. But the melody came back into my head recently and I’ve been listening to it on repeat for the past week. I have no idea what the song is about, but I think I can safely say it has nothing to do with a global pandemic. Yet, it feels right for this time: It’s melancholy and relays a sense of somebody or something receiving its comeuppance. And that’s poignant right now.
Plus the drums sound fantastic.
I’m bad at this, but here it goes: If you liked what you read today, please feel free to share or tell your friends to subscribe.
Also, if you want to read any of my non-newsletter work, you can find the majority of my writing here.