Covering Coronavirus: Tips, best practices and programs

UC Berkeley grad students give NYT’s California coronavirus coverage a boost

Geeta Anand, photo by
Clara Mokri

Earlier this week, The New York Times featured a new byline: Annie Berman. Her name appeared over a 680-word story about the virus-inflicted dread a California ski town felt about once-welcome outsiders.

Berman’s debut was the start of a new collaboration between The New York Times and the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to expand coronavirus coverage in the state.

Berman, a second-year student at the graduate school, is one of more than 80 students and 20 journalism instructors reporting, photographing and collecting data about the pandemic’s effect in each of the state’s 58 counties. Assembled into teams, their work appears in  California Today, the Time’s weekday newsletter in the Golden State,  or in the print and online editions of The Times.

Leading the project are two Berkeley professors who are former Times reporters and Pulitzer Prize winners – David Barstow and Geeta Anand. We reached out to Anand to learn more about how the project began and how it’s operating.

What was the genesis of this collaboration with the New York Times? 

Anand: David Barstow, chair of the Investigative Reporting Program at the journalism school, reached out to editors at The Times and proposed this collaboration. He had worked at The Times for 20 years and won four Pulitzers for the paper before he came to the journalism school last year, so he has very close ties and is deeply trusted by the editors there.

David Barstow, photo by Wesaam Al-Badry

What were the main issues that had to be addressed, resolved before you were able to proceed?

Anand: There were so many issues that had to be resolved. Would we allow students to go out to report stories during this pandemic?  If so, under what conditions? How would we enable students to have the time to work on these stories given their regular course load? Would the dean and faculty support replacing our regular courses with this project to give students the time and space to participate? The faculty, after lots of discussion, supported offering the opportunity to students to work on this project instead of normal classes but also to still keep teaching the regular course-load for those who wanted to stick with their regular classes.

What precedents did you rely upon, if any? 

Anand: We didn’t rely on any precedents. We developed this project ourselves with strong input from the dean, the instructors, students and editors at the NYT.

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Could you describe the process of a story, perhaps using the Mammoth Lake story as an example?

Anand: The reporter, Annie Berman, is a second-year student who was working in a small team of four students under an audio journalism instructor, Anna Sussman, covering rural counties high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In addition to teaching at our journalism school, Anna is senior producer and managing editor of WNYC’s Snap Judgment. Each student is in charge of doing basic reporting in one of California’s 58 counties, and Annie was in charge of covering Mono County, in addition to general reporting.

As she called around the county to answer data questions we had asked all student reporters to answer, such as how many COVID-19 cases their county had and how many hospital beds, she learned that Mono had the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the state and that local officials were worried because they only had a tiny hospital with 17 beds.

Once Annie talked to the county health officer who was very dramatic and articulate in describing the situation, she and Anna knew they had a story. They wrote up a pitch and put it on the story budget, which David discussed with the NYT editors in charge of working with us on stories. Anna did a first edit of Annie’s story and sent it to David, who shaped it into a NYT style news feature and sent it over to the paper.

Do you see a way for a program such as this to outlast the current crisis? How would that work?

Anand: It would be our dream for a program like this to outlast the current crisis. I’m not sure how that would work but perhaps in some variation of the current model with our students covering the state of California. But to be honest, we haven’t had time to think about a longer-term version of our project because we’re running so fast trying to make this work.

What are you finding most challenging about covering the pandemic?

Anand: The most challenging thing is rapidly building a newsroom of more than 80 student reporters and 20 instructor editors as we are covering the news. Setting up the processes and making sure students are learning and feeling supported even as they are doing these stories is really important and difficult to accomplish. David and I are functioning as the managing editors and final editors of the stories before we send them to The Times.

How are you taking care of yourself?

Anand: I am relying on the things that have always sustained me and trying to keep them going even as I’m working long days and weekends—yoga, meditation and long walks.

Wesaam Al-Badry, a student at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, taking pictures for a story on the struggle of farmworkers in the Salinas Valley confronting the COVID-19 crisis. Photo by Lulu Orozco Perez.