Photo by Trent Erwin on Unsplash
These tools and resources can help journalists improve their reporting and expand coverage of the pandemic.
If you’re interested in doing your COVID-19 reporting better, or just providing better coverage period, then you should make use of some or all of these resources and tools to make that happen.
With disinformation having become such a constant companion of the pandemic, the role of factual and accurate reporting on health issues has been heightened like never before.
These resources are meant to guide journalists navigating the disinfodemic in trying to optimally communicate the facts to largely informationally overwhelmed audiences.
First Draft
First Draft has become a truly invaluable resource for online guidance and training in the disinfodemic era, offering the “best reads on disinformation from around the world”.
First Draft has great articles and resources on vaccines disinformation:
And of course there’s First Draft’s Vaccine Insights Hub:
Journalist’s Toolbox
This is another great online resource worth exploring and constantly using. Bookmark it!
Journalist’s Toolbox has a wonderfully curated COVID-19 vaccines portal specially for journalists:
#CoronaVirusFacts Alliance
This is a groundbreaking collaborative initiative of the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), based at the Poynter Institute, with over 100 fact checkers in over 70 countries participating in a global COVID-19 disinformation debunking exercise since January 2020.
If you want to know if something has been debunked before or whether it’s been viral elsewhere, this is the place to go to check.
AFP Fact Check
AFP Fact Check, a unit of the international news agency AFP, has been debunking coronavirus myths since the beginning of the pandemic and has a webpage dedicated to this. It’s a good place to search for very good debunks of COVID-19 related disinformation.
To access the debunks go to:
AFP Fact Check also has some great short videos on fact checking and verification that can be viewed on their Facebook page. Go here:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/1396364020508066/901730560402111/
Africa Check
To get an idea of what falsehoods have been going viral across the continent, Africa Check is the answer. They also have a well curated archive of COVID-19 related disinformation.
For access to their COVID-19 articles and reports go to:
https://africacheck.org/search?f%5B0%5D=topic%3A156
Africa Check also has a range of wonderful guides for reporters and fact checkers:
https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/guides
Our World in Data
This is a good site to visit to get an overview of what’s happening on the global COVID-19 vaccines landscape. Go here:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
These are by no means the only resources and tools available online, but they are a good start to unlocking improved coverage of the COVID-19 health emergency.