Exploring News Innovations, Journalistic Routines, and Role Perceptions during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Egyptian Journalists

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 21 Egyptian journalists, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured news work and journalistic routines in Egyptian newsrooms. In so doing, the paper examines the various technical and logistical challenges encountered by Egyptian journalists as well as their changing role perceptions during the emergency health crisis. It further investigates the innovative practices adopted by newsrooms, on both the news content and newsroom levels, to overcome those challenges in terms of sourcing norms, news production routines, and storytelling formats. Findings demonstrate that Egyptian journalists struggled at the beginning of the pandemic, but started to find creative solutions to overcome the many practical and infrastructural challenges. The pandemic accelerated the digitization of editorial news production systems and the unprecedented adoption of news automation and artificial intelligence technologies. More dependence on interactive digital storytelling formats and data visualization tools was reported. Journalistic innovation occurred therefore as recombination of already existing products or services, but not new inventions. In terms of role perception, there was a shift to a more facilitative role, in which science and more quantitatively oriented forms of journalism play a central role.