Communicating Crises Collaboratively: Employing a Journalist-Scholar Partnership to Implement and Evaluate COVID-19 Communication

Our COVID-19 research, communication, and evaluation project leveraged an existing National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project team to research and evaluate public knowledge gaps and public-facing COVID-19 communication strategies as a multidisciplinary group of journalists, scholars, and evaluators. Using the established researcher-practitioner partnership, the project explored how COVID-19 coverage could most effectively engage as well as educate young audiences about viral transmission and its prevention, and which journalistic practices could best be applied to pandemic communication and translated to other media outlets. The collaboration resulted in identification of top COVID-19 misinformation topics and journalistic stories to address them, two research reports for general audiences, and two peer-reviewed articles (with other studies in process), as well as a series of process evaluation reports detailing the collaboration’s challenges and opportunities. All of these have been made publicly available at the project website (https://www.kqed.org/crackingthecode) and on https://informalscience.org. Crisis communicationCrisis communication—including through future pandemic scenarios—may benefit from developing similar collaborative researcher-practitioner partnerships to leverage the expertise of journalists and researchers to produce, evaluate, and refine public-facing crisis coverage in the teeth of substantial, evolving, and immediate threats. This chapter details our collaborative model, summarizes the journalistic, academic, and evaluative deliverables it produced, and outlines findings of proposed practices and partnership dynamics for future crisis communicationCrisis communication scenarios.