Crisis news reports are critical to keeping the public informed during a time of crisis. This type of reporting requires rapid updates, investigative work, and powerful storytelling across multiple platforms and formats. It also demands a high level of ethical standards, source verification, and factual integrity.
This article explores a specific example of UK energy crisis coverage, focusing on the use of a particular set of characterising features to make the evolving story comprehensible for watching audiences. Emerging TV journalism re-frames the developing crisis event through a narrative of intense developments, a geography of crisis impacts and accounts of related suffering that arguably reflects a form of ‘crisis subjectivity’. Combined with a focus on mediated solution themes, the resulting retelling breaks with many established ideas of existing journalistic reactions to singular crisis events.
While it may seem counterproductive, a company’s initial reaction to a crisis should be a quick and transparent response. Any deviance from the intended purpose can worsen the situation by creating confusion or fuelling speculation and rumor.
Effective crisis reporting requires bravery, a strong sense of moral duty, and emotional resilience. Those who do it well are true unsung heroes. It’s a challenging field that’s rapidly changing and requires skills in breaking news, photojournalism, investigative journalism, broadcast, social media, multimedia, data analysis and a lot more.