Nuffield Foundation to fund new RISJ COVID-19 research
The Nuffield Foundation will fund an eight-month project at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ), which will investigate how the British public get information about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers at RISJ have won funding for a project to analyse how the British public is navigating information and misinformation about coronavirus and about how the government and other institutions are responding to the pandemic.
According to the World Health Organisation, societies are experiencing an ‘infodemic’, a tsunami of information including also increased misinformation, rumours, and the like, alongside the coronavirus pandemic. As people seek information from professional journalists, official government sources, national and international health authorities, various experts, and other sources, much of this is accessed through news media making editorial decisions about what to cover (and how) and through digital platforms using algorithms to rank content in different ways, and much of it judged in terms of how much different people trust these various sources and platforms as they try to navigate the crisis.
The project coordinated by Richard Fletcher and Rasmus Nielsen working with Antonis Kalogeropoulos from the University of Liverpool and Felix Simon from the Oxford Internet Institute, will track the evolving situation in real time in the UK and identify factors that influence how informed people are and how they understand and respond to the crisis. The final conclusions will be published in several public reports, and more in-depth analysis later in peer reviewed academic outlets.
