The most unexpected feature for journalism, regardless of the platform, was telecommuting.
With this Covid pandemic, not only did the shift toward the digital environment accelerate, so did remote work, a practice that until this situation was limited to correspondents abroad or within the country.
The need to confine vast masses of different populations, in order to protect them from the widespread coronavirus, hastened the massification of remote work, a modality that reporters and executives, from all the media platforms, had to follow and assimilate.
Until this day, two modalities coexist: the face-to-face, with very few people being nearby, and the remote, from homes. And I think it’ll stay like this for a long time.
The upheaval of traditional schemes also forced the implementation of creative forms of associations, through alliances that digital and printed newspapers, television and radio stations made with each other, or with similar media from all different cities and countries, to ensure a broad news coverage.
In this scenario, “free-lancers” suddenly stepped in, derived from being fired from companies that either were going downhill then closed or were forced to reduce their staff count due to financial declines.
These profiles, whom are experienced in the fields of professional journalism, now practice autonomously, at the service of whoever hires them for temporary tasks.
Many of the ones who’ve been fired, some more suddenly than others, have founded small news agencies to offer their work and effort to printed or digital newspapers that have seen their staff shrink.
Others, in turn, have decided to stablish their own news websites, beginning to build modest journalistic companies, hoping to succeed.
As we see, journalism never dies. It reinvents itself and mutates into different forms, depending on the circumstances.
- Translated from Spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 