COVID-19 induced changes to news gathering and news production: Practical experiences from five Ghanaian newsrooms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study, grounded in Kurt Lewin’s theory of change management, investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced change in the news gathering and news production process in five newsrooms in Ghana. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews, our study proves that the social restrictions that were introduced due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced Ghanaian newsrooms to introduce certain measures, including work-from-home policies, a strategy that had never been explored prior to the pandemic. Our study further reveals that, whereas male journalists were usually given tasks that were considered dangerous, such as reporting from the morgue and intensive care units of hospitals, female journalists were usually assigned news conferences and tasked to conduct interviews with various stakeholders, a gender perspective to news gathering during the pandemic which has never been reported. Based on these and other findings, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic did indeed drive change in how journalists gather and produce news.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".