An elderly woman reads a newspaper on a bench, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Stockholm, Sweden April 20, 2020. Ali Lorestani/TT News Agency/via REUTERS
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the European Journalism Centre, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations Program on Independent Journalism have all joined the Independent News Emergency Relief Coordination (INERC) to help collect data on the coronavirus crisis’ impact on independent news media and coordinate help.
To inform INERC members’ work, and document the impact of the pandemic on independent news media, the INERC survey is now in the field in English and in the process of being translated to multiple other languages.
The INERC survey is a survey of news media organisations specifically and focused exclusively on how the pandemic has impacted audience reach, business model, revenues, and what kinds of support might be helpful. It supplements other important efforts underway elsewhere to understand the impact on individual journalists and wider issues including advocacy, development, and policy.
All data will be confidential and only accessible to researchers at the Reuters Institute, and all findings only presented in a fully anonymised and aggregate way. If respondents provide us with explicit permission at the end of the survey, we will share their contact information and what kinds of help they would find beneficial with INERC group members, but nothing else is shared. The survey is for data collection, not a funding application. All applications for help should go to individual INERC members who also make their own decisions about what kind of help they will offer and to whom.
The survey is a rolling survey fielded exclusively through INERC group members directly to their contacts and networks. If you are interested in potentially taking part in the survey but have not yet received it from any of the INERC members, please contact us at inerc@politics.ox.ac.uk.
The Independent News Emergency Relief Coordination (INERC) was launched on May 1 as a temporary effort to work together to help funders willing and able to provide significant financial support for independent news media better understand where the need is greatest and coordinate their efforts to make the greatest possible difference in this moment.
INERC is chaired by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford working with the Institute's Head of Leadership Development Federica Cherubini, and with support from Luminate.
The founding members are BBC Media Action, Center for International Media Assistance, Facebook, Global Forum for Media Development, Google, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Luminate, and WAN-IFRA, World Association of News Publishers.
