COVID-19 Canada: Gloria Dickie Talks About Her Experience Covering Covid-19
Gloria Dickie is a science and environmental journalist currently based in Vancouver. Her stories on climate change, food sustainability, population, biodiversity conservation and a lot more, have won her awards, with several of her writings published in international publications. In this profile for CFWIJ, Gloria share how Covid-19 has impacted her as a journalist.
Since she works as a freelancer, covering the pandemic has been a “hit and miss” for her.
“Some publications have seen their budgets drop off drastically due to the pandemic, others are overwhelmed with pitches and only assigning to staff writers at the moment. For the first month, the appetite for any non-Covid stories was pretty non-existent. A bunch of freelancers had a Google document circulating with a list of publications no longer accepting freelance work and the list was long,” she shared.
Gloria further adds that has mostly been focused on tapping into the communities that she has worked in before in Asia.
“I recently reached out to some scientists I had connected with in central India. I was wondering what was happening with wild tigers after the announcement that the Bronx Zoo tiger had tested positive for coronavirus. That story ended up in The New York Times. I also spent a lot of time reporting on wildlife rescue centers in Vietnam last year and reached out to those folks when I realized they had essentially lost all their funding from tourism. That story ran in The Guardian.”
Gloria informed us about the situation of coronavirus in British Columbia and how difficult it is for journalists like her to share relevant stories from the island with the rest of the world.
“There are only about 30 confirmed active cases at the moment on the island which has a population of about 800,000 and fewer than 2,000 in the province. So British Columbia is actually doing really well compared to the rest of the country, and certainly compared to the United States. As an average person, that's great news. As a journalist, it makes my job harder,” she said, adding that Canada is a hard sell to international media even under normal circumstances, and its domestic market for freelance stories is pretty small.
She said that she has been pitching stories on British Columbia's relative success in handling the pandemic, but the market for such a story is not as huge in the US at the moment.
“At one point BC even had one of the highest testing rates per capita in the world and we were far surpassing South Korea. There are definitely a lot of stories to be told here, but journalists are hamstrung by limited clientele. I think a lot of freelance journalists who are used to being "hypermobile" are struggling with this sort of thing. Suddenly, we might not be where the news is and have no way of getting there,” she added.
Gloria has not been reporting on the ground, but she is certainly keeping an eye on developments by “getting up, getting coffee, pitching and calling people”.
Despite not being on the ground, Gloria shared her observations regarding the challenging journalists are facing out there. She said that a lot of coronavirus assignments seem to be dictated by being in the right place at the right time.
“Many of us are having to look beyond our own immediate communities to tell the bigger stories,” Gloria stated.
Even though she has not been able to reduce her news consumption on all things Covid-19, Gloria takes daily walks and maintains a normal sleep schedule to keep sane.
“I find I'm typically rearing to go at dawn, but things start to pile on by late afternoon and the stress starts getting to me - hence an early bedtime so I don't feel totally overwhelmed!... Connecting with colleagues over Zoom and Skype has also been really important. In some ways, I actually find I'm getting more social contact than before as a lot of my friends are based around the world, not in my city, and now there's more of an emphasis in connecting digitally, Gloria shared with CFWIJ.
In terms of the impact Covid-19 has had on journalists and their reporting, Gloria let us in on the changes she has observed so far and afraid that it will also affect her future reporting trips.
“Well, I'm not spending any time in coffee shops now!” she said, and added that she has always struggled to actually "work from home" and likes to have a certain amount of noise/action around herself when filing a story.
“Looking ahead to December 2020, I'm definitely concerned about the ability to travel for work. I've already had to cancel a few reporting trips I had planned, and conferences will probably be off the table as well at least until next year. I'm expecting the impact to be pretty drawn out for journalists. Even when the rest of society has returned to "normal," I think international travel will be the last holdout,” she shared her concerns with CFWIJ.
Covid-19: Women Journalists On The Front Lines
