In December, 2022 I found myself sitting in a hotel bar in Almaty, Kazakhstan talking with a friend and colleague who works for the World Health Organization about the importance of building communities of knowledge, practice, and experience to tackle global problems like COVID-19. Practitioners and politicians get the benefit of research-informed decision-making and academics get the benefit of seeing
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Public health practitioners have long known that poor communication during health crises risks lives. This is why the WHO and most national public health agencies invest in risk and crisis communication. However, that does not mean it always is effective. In fact, COVID-19 has provided the opportunity to better understand what can go right and wrong in strategic communication efforts
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When many think about crisis communication, they think about what happens once a crisis emerges and traditional research in the field asks a number of questions like: However, I think this is a limited way of thinking about crisis communication that artificially separates it from the risk and crisis communication cycle, which is something that I talk about in the
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In the Trump era, we’re increasingly debating what is ‘real’ news and what is ‘fake news’. I think most sensible people can agree that information that is patently untrue and not verifiable counts as fake news. For example, if a news outlet were to run a story based on Internet rumors that could not be otherwise verified, it could be
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In our crazy information rich world, it’s sometimes hard to evaluate ‘credible’ sources. I think it’s usually worth having a conversation about credible sources — especially when we seem to be increasingly debating ‘whose facts belong to whom’. Those opinions always cause me to cringe because information is value neutral… what we do with it is not. However, in an
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This editorial was first published in the Journal of Mass Communication and Journalism and is re-posted under Creative Commons Attribution License. “For the legions of critics who had previously dismissed platforms like Facebook and Twitter as vapid troughs of celebrity gossip and selfaggrandizement, the toppling of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt suggested that these tools were as effective for organizing protests and
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Audra Diers-Lawson 