Video recordings of the Knight Center’s multilingual webinar, “Covering the COVID-19 Vaccines: What Journalists Need to Know,” are now available for free in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
All versions of the webinar can be easily accessed for free and in an ongoing way on a new page available on the Knight Center’s Journalism Courses website.
The webinar was held on Jan. 29 in collaboration with UNESCO and the World Health Organization, with funding from the European Union.
The three-hour event featured an international lineup of science journalists, virologists and medical experts and was divided into three panel discussions moderated by health and science journalist Maryn McKenna, who is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
The first panel featured science journalists from Argentina, Brazil, Germany and France who spoke about their experiences covering the vaccines, as well as best practices and pitfalls to avoid. During the second panel, science and health experts from around the world discussed key scientific developments with the different vaccines being developed to fight COVID-19. And the third and final panel looked at the logistical challenges of distributing the vaccines on an international level, including addressing and overcoming socioeconomic issues.
A common thread in all three panels concerned misinformation and disinformation surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines.
To complement the webinar recordings, UNESCO and WHO developed a multilingual list of resources for journalists covering the vaccines, available here.
The webinar is part of an ongoing series of training events that the Knight Center has organized to help journalists improve their coverage of COVID-19. In the coming months, McKenna will teach a massive open online course (MOOC) on covering the COVID-19 vaccines. The course will be available in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and registration is scheduled to launch in March, so please routinely check JournalismCourses.org for more information.
Journalists can also take the online course “Journalism in a Pandemic: Covering COVID-19 Now and in the Future,” which is available in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. This self-directed course features video instruction and interviews (plus transcripts), readings and optional resources and it is based on a MOOC offered in May of 2020, taken by nearly 9,000 people from around the world.
