With empty newsrooms, no studio audiences, highly limited travel, and few face-to-face interviews, journalists, authors, and TV people confront the biggest story of the era
Around mid-afternoon on Wednesday, CBS News executives got word that two of their employees had tested positive for COVID-19. A little after 3 p.m., the information was shared widely within the company, and employees were instructed to evacuate the network’s Manhattan headquarters so they could be disinfected. New York–based producers who were working on that night’s installment of thewhich is broadcast out of Washington, cleared out, and the team in D.C.
As the novel coronavirus continues its inexorable spread, the world is changing in real time, by the day, by the hour, by the minute. The media’s work is to tell the story—but it has to do so with radically new rules. Talk shows are being produced without live studio audiences or going dark altogether. CNN’s March 15 primary debate will proceed without an audience or a spin room. Newspapers and magazines are being produced with everyone working from home.
“I did not want to become an inadvertant [sic] spreader of the illness, and that was a possibility, and being the occasion for exactly the kind of large gathering we are being told worsens the risk of epidemic was increasingly clearly a bad thing to be,”on Facebook. “We are in the strange situation where we must be apart to come together as civil society. Apart physically to be together in limiting this crisis.
Someone who works in late night put it this way: “Everything is new territory.” Earlier in the week, producers from the usually fiercely competitive late-night broadcasts began talking. They initially made the decision to collectively announce on Wednesday that the broadcasts would begin taping sans audiences starting next week, a step that daytime talkers likehad already taken.
—announced that they would cease broadcasting next week altogether. As my late-night source said, “No one knows where this is going.”is executive editor of the health-news website Stat, but before that he spent nearly three decades as a reporter and editor at the’s chief political correspondent back then, and there was a contingency plan for the Washington bureau to operate out of his nearby house in the event of a major emergency.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Coronavirus Fake News: Fact Checking COVID-19 Pandemic Hoaxes and Misinformation OnlineAre the stories you're seeing on COVID-19 fact or fiction?
Read more »
Google is making a coronavirus information site to help find testing as more kits become availablePichai said employees asked about whether Verily could help in COVID-19 efforts.
Read more »
Watch live: New York Gov. Cuomo holds press conference on the coronavirus outbreakNew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to update the public on the COVID-19 outbreak.
Read more »
Why COVID-19 Will Inevitably Lead to Breakups“We’re literally in the middle of a fight right now.' How stress over coronavirus is leading to some serious spats
Read more »