City Research Online

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 Egyptian journalists, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic has reconfigured news work and journalistic routines in Egyptian newsrooms. In so doing, the paper examines the various technical and logistical challenges encountered by Egyptian journalists as well as their changing role perceptions during the emergency health crisis. It further investigates the innovative practices adopted by newsrooms, on both the news content and newsroom levels, to overcome those challenges in terms of sourcing norms, news production routines, and storytelling formats. Findings demonstrate that Egyptian journalists struggled at the beginning of the pandemic, but started to find creative solutions to overcome the many practical and infrastructural challenges. The pandemic accelerated the digitization of editorial news production systems and the unprecedented adoption of news automation and artificial intelligence technologies. More dependence on interactive digital storytelling formats and data visualization tools was reported. Journalistic innovation occurred therefore as recombination of already existing products or services, but not new inventions. In terms of role perception, there was a shift to a more facilitative role, in which science and more quantitatively oriented forms of journalism play a central role.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Publisher Keywords:	News innovation, Egyptian journalists, journalistic routines, case study, role perceptions, COVID-19 pandemic
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1990 Broadcasting R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity > Journalism
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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