So could you start by giving me a name and saying what your position is?
Yes. I'm Richard Fletcher and I am a senior research fellow and leader of the research team
at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Okay. Thanks very much. And can you just we don't have time for your entire life story,
but could you just give me a rough summary of how you got to where you are now and
how you became interested in the field of research that you're interested in.
So my I originally studied computer science at university and then after that I did a master's degree in science,
technology, medicine and society, then a Ph.D. in sociology.
And after that and I was looking for research opportunities and I found one studying journalism at the City University in London.
And that project was looking at how it would be possible to build a tool that could be used
by journalists and the public in order to verify information that they find on social media.
And this led to a sort of follow up position here at the Voice Institute, and that was in 2015.
And I've been here ever since. And and here we research journalism, how people get news and information across different countries.
And, of course, that that fed into some of the work we did on coronavirus starting in 2020.
And we've looked back. But I'm quite interested in the transition you make from being a computer scientist to being somebody who's,
I suppose, broadly speaking, in the social sciences. Yes. And it wasn't planned.
It was something that was attacked quite well.
I have worked on on projects which involve data when I was studying computing
science and although data wasn't really a sort of seen as as important as it is,
it is now. And, you know, in the intervening time, the social sciences became more sort of data oriented, I think, and, and that's their skills.
Working with data and programming became useful in, in,
in terms of social research in ways that I didn't anticipate, but it's worked out reasonably well.
And when you went to study journalism, have you had any thoughts of actually becoming a journalist yourself at that point?
We always interested in studying it as a as if, you know,
you had never wanted to be a journalist or was interested in journalism and the news media, but not not something I'd wanted to work actively in.
And I was just interested in, in, in being a researcher and understandings of society and people better and people's relationship
with the news media and how they get news and information is it's always been interesting to me,
and that's something that's massively changed over the last I don't know.
You want to start with that in the last 30 years?
I can say yes.
When is the projects, the ongoing projects that we have here at the institute, it's called the Digital News Report, and that started in 2012.
And it was one of the first projects that really tried to look at how people got news and information across multiple countries.
People have done this in in specific countries, but they hadn't compared it that often.
So that started before I was here.
But it's still going it's based on an annual survey now in about 40 different countries of how people get news and information.
And since 2012, when we started up till and this year, that we've seen huge change.
So in particular,
the rise of social media as a as a source of information and the decline of traditional forms of news media like print and to a certain extent,
television and the growth of smartphones in particular, as a way for people to connect to the Internet and then and then access to news.
And is it possible to put figures on the size of that change?
Yes, roughly from memory. It's of in 2013 in many countries.
And about a quarter of people said that they access regularly access news and
information on their on their smartphone compared to around 70% in some countries now.
So it's a huge change. And it's something that, you know, even if you said it is year on year, you can you can see large increases.
And this is why we do the project every year rather than every five years, which is what a lot of, you know, longitudinal studies do.
And just because the rate of change has been has been so dramatic in some areas, and of course, this varies across countries.
Some countries haven't changed as much as others.
But it's you know, that's what makes it interesting and that's what it justifies the the inclusion of lots of different countries in the study.
And that presumably also involved a proliferation of providers from having.
You know,
a relatively small number of recognised news organisations within each country to having a number of sources that are available by the by the end.
That's right. There's been a huge growth in in information supply.
But at the same time, the the sort of demand, you know, sort of within these past hasn't really changed a huge amount.
So there's a huge there's much more choice than the was.
And, of course, there's this this sort of pre-dates the Internet to a certain extent when with the growth of cable television and so on.
But the Internet has has has made that more pronounced.
And although it's still true that the the traditional news organisations in this country,
the BBC, The Guardian, the Mail and so on, is still the most widely used sources of news.
And there are many more outlets in the so-called long tail, meaning that if people are aware of them, they can access them online.
And this is added huge diversity to to people's news and information reportage in some cases.
And does that also mean that there's been a fragmentation that's the on the demand side that people, you know,
fall into groups that access their news from a particular source and would never look at another source.
Is there any evidence of any kind of an increased fragmentation like that?
I mean, not really. I think it's still the case that for most people that the large traditional news brands are still the most the most widely used.
And that accounts for a huge amount of the total news use.
And so if this fragmentation is on a smaller scale and it's among sort of smaller groups in society,
perhaps I'll have turned away from these large news sources and and are accessing alternative sources.
But even for many of these people, they're still coming back to, for example,
the BBC and and the man in the garden and so on as that as that's a reference point.
So it's only a very, very small part of the population that have that have abandoned the sort of mainstream news sources entirely.
Hmm. And can you just tell me a little bit more about how the digital news and so the work sort
of maybe step turns like you did in news report works and how do you collect the data?
So the data we collect each year through an online survey which is administered by the polling company YouGov.
But the, the questionnaire is designed by us and a team at the Institute.
We go into the field in January and February each year and then and then that
gives us enough time to analyse the data ready for publication in the summer,
usually in the middle of June. But it's based on an online survey.
We also do. We also supplement it with qualitative research, not in as many countries.
So we typically run focus groups or interview sessions in in a handful of countries
that we can use to better understand some of the data we get from the survey.
And YouGov makes a selection of it. It targets a representative.
That's right. Yeah. The sample that obviously is an online survey.
So we can't reach anyone who doesn't have access to the Internet.
But in many of the countries we study, the internet penetration is very high and we use quite a sampling.
So YouGov ensure that we have the right number of men, women and people of a certain age groups, etc. that matches the national population.
Hmm. And what kind of questions are you asking? So some of these are quite fundamental questions.
So what sources of news people are using, how often they're using them?
But also we look at people's attitudes towards the news, whether they trust it,
whether they think they're avoiding the news more than they used to and things like that.
So it's a mixture of behaviour and attitudes about about two thirds of the survey we keep the same every year,
so we want to track developments over time.
And the remaining third is devoted to the new issues that have emerged that we want to get people's opinion on.
So finally, turning to coronavirus, just from a personal point of view,
can you remember how you first came to hear about it and realised that it was something that was going to be relevant to your research?
And I can't remember the exact dates,
but I certainly remember hearing about it as something that was still quite far away in January 2020 and discussing it with friends and so on.
And I also, you know, on Twitter, you you would see experts of epidemiologists sort of speculating,
but also you remember somebody quite, quite concerned.
And I think that was probably the very first moment that I thought in.
This could be something that's very serious. And then I think when it really dawned on me that this was going to have a large
impact on daily life when European countries started going into lockdown,
and then at that point it felt almost inevitable that the UK would follow at some point.
Mm hmm. And what did you see?
Did you see that as an opportunity to dedicate part of your your data gathering,
your research to focus on how that was going to impact on the consumption of news and trusted news and so on?
Well, I'm biased, and I always think that communication is is is always important for any sort of political event,
and I think particularly so during a crisis.
And I did remember thinking that maybe we could do some research that would help.
And I know that and particularly in the UK, we know we have a good sense of of where sort of research like the research that we do might come from.
And we thought we were quite well-placed to be able to make a contribution because we thought we could
we could do something that was timely because we we imagine the situation would change very quickly.
And we thought maybe we could we and we were agile enough to be able to sort of
generate some reliable data that could feed into into people's understanding.
Mm hmm. And.
And so what did you do? I mean, did you did you need to raise funding in order to get something started?
Or were you able to simply adapt what you were already doing?
It's a bit of both. So one of the first things we did was and this was in April 2020, was a six country survey of news views,
but specifically on coronavirus news use and the funding from that came from an existing project that was ongoing,
the Misinformation Science and Media Project, which was funded by the Oxford Martin School.
We were able to see some of the funding to work on this project and simultaneously
I think we also saw funding from the Nuffield Foundation for a projects,
specifically looking at the UK over time.
So we proposed a ten wave survey.
So starting with this large panel of respondents and then coming back to them every two weeks for several months.
And for that we, we bid for funding from the Nuffield Foundation and we got that.
So we were able to start that in April as well.
Hmm. So let's just take those two projects.
So obviously, misinformation has been an issue throughout the pandemic, but it was an issue before in a variety of other political and social areas.
So. So what were the findings of the first study?
The first study of the six countries study was the primary purpose, I think,
was to look at the differences between countries and we deliberately selected countries that were at different stages.
So we had countries from Asia Pacific where the the pandemic had been going on for a little bit longer.
We had European countries where which were just going into lockdown,
but we also had Latin American countries where really the pandemic hadn't had really arrived to the same extent.
So that was the point of comparison. One of the things we found, despite those differences, it was a very large increase in and in self-reported news.
You said people with say, in their access in news a lot more. And also at the same time, we also noticed an increase in people's trust in the news.
And what we we called this a rally around the news effect, which borrows a term from political science, the rally around the flag effect,
which is where in a crisis, people people's support for their for their leaders tend tends to tends to tend to go up.
And I guess because people are concerned and where the future and they have little choice but to put a bit more trust in those in charge.
And when we saw a similar effect across all countries because even though the pandemic hadn't arrived,
it was still a global news event and behind people were aware of it.
Mm hmm. So. So, yeah. So that's interesting that they were more trustworthy, more trusting.
Yeah, that was. I mean, we I suppose we'd expected news use to go up.
That wasn't a huge surprise, but we weren't we weren't quite prepared for the increased interest.
Just to keep in mind that since 2015, when we've been tracking trust in the news, it's been almost consistent sort of decline in many countries.
So it was very unusual to see to see trust go up in that way.
But you think it was that the reason was the fact that there was this global crisis that we think so.
I mean, later on, we when we asked similar questions in the digital news report, which is, of course, across across you know,
in 40 different countries, we saw an increase in trust even that was a bit later in almost all of those.
And we thought that there was only really one sort of global event big enough in order to create that that that that sort of parallel rise everywhere.
And of course, then the next question is, what is that? What's actually really going on?
And that's why we're not so sure.
But my my thinking is that coronavirus squeezed out a lot of the sort of political news and replaced it with something that was a bit less partisan,
a bit less divisive. And when you ask people why they don't trust the news, they often mention bias and this kind of thing.
And I think there is less room for that in the not in every country, of course, but in many countries there was there was less of that.
And I think that that that sort of filtered through to people's people's attitudes.
And presumably, there was just a hunger for information, I'm thinking particularly of things like was this was part of your six countries study.
But in the UK there were daily briefings with the Prime Minister and the chief scientific and medical advisers.
And I think a lot of people I mean, I only watched TV that kind of Sunday,
but a lot of people felt that knowing what had been said at those briefings was an important part of that day.
That's right. One of the other things that we saw early on was not just an increase in news organisations,
a source of information about coronavirus, but other other sources as well.
So politicians, scientists were much more prominent than they were than they would normally be, especially scientists who, as you mentioned,
were part of the daily briefings in the UK and were used as a source of information much more widely than they would be in normal times.
Mm hmm. And, I mean, this is relatively new that the general public have had access to things like
the Johns Hopkins data was published at regular intervals and all well debated,
dated some of these other online data sources that simply prevent presented the figures,
which I suppose previously would have needed to be mediated through some kind of journalistic.
That's right, yes. Ofcom, I think in their study they did they were doing a study that was quite similar to
ours in the UK and I think it's still ongoing and we're tracking that as well.
The use of certain sort of dashboards, tracking cases and deaths and so on.
And they and in their data these are quite widely used and I think it became part of some people,
not everyone of course, but some people's sort of daily media habits is sort of checking in with these sources.
Mm hmm. Satanic duo UK study that.
That just ran for eight, eight months. Is that right? Exactly what it was.
Yes, we, we, we, we it ran from end of April to end of August in terms of data collection.
And then we were still publishing the results of that, you know, up until up until October.
But that, you know, the field work was April and August. And what were the main questions you were asking?
It was similar to those that we'd asked in the in the six country study.
But the strength in this in this case was collecting data from the same people over time.
So we could really see how people's attitudes and behaviours were changing.
And one of the things we saw fairly early on in the project was that that sort of peak of news use
and also trust was really in April or the end of April and then and then the beginning of May.
And the decline after that was, was quite sharp. And going in sort of alongside that, you could also see people's behaviour changing.
And we were going into the summer at this point and say people were, you know,
following the U.S. describing how they were following the, the sort of guide and slightly less so religiously than they had been.
And if still the majority of the, you know, following the guidance, you know, very closely.
But I guess one of the questions that you asked was, yeah, yeah, we did.
We asked that. And and I think. Not just Asadi.
This was something that the others way but were tracking as well.
And I think one of the defining themes was the sort of high degree of public willingness to follow the rules.
And also one of the things that we noticed we asked people questions about,
which really designed to tap their knowledge of coronavirus or how much they knew about the virus and the rules surrounding it.
And we found we didn't have anything to directly compare it to.
But what I saw were very high levels of sort of awareness and knowledge of the of the,
of the virus and also what people needed to do in order to stay safe from it.
Mm hmm. And, yeah, so those were the.
Peak and declining trust. And the high level of knowledge were to two of the findings from that with her and others.
Yes. I mean, one of the and as part of this project, we we we we published the results of each survey shortly after.
So two week intervals, we published a what we call a fact sheets which which had the numbers.
And we also did a couple of some longer reports that tried to sort of bring together some of the findings from that in ten weeks.
And the first of those looked at what we called the inequalities in in news and information use.
So at the beginning of the pandemic, when the when the news use was at its highest,
then really there were very small differences between between demographic groups in terms of how much news and information they were getting,
because it sort of everyone was was getting news at that point.
So it had papered over some of the long standing inequalities in news use that we know exists.
So, for example, younger people tend to consume less news.
Women tend to consume less news. People with lower levels of formal education consume less news and so on.
But at this point in the beginning of the the pandemic in the UK and those gaps had temporarily disappeared.
And what we saw over time was that that that re-emergence and and although news news use
was still a lot higher even even during the summer than than it would be in normal times,
it was that those gaps re-emerged. And of course, because we think that the people people's news information is very important for how they behave,
how much they know during the crisis that that was a cause for concern.
And then later on, we tried to come up with a concept that sort of captured this, which we called the infodemic and vulnerable.
And this was the group that consumes almost no news and information about coronavirus and also has very low trust or no trust in that information,
even if they were to come across it, and partly because of the inequalities that had emerged during the the pandemic,
but also because we also saw a rise in in news avoidance.
So people stepping back from the news because they think there's too much of it or it's having a negative effect on their on their wellbeing.
We saw the size of the Infodemic Vulnerable group grow over time slightly.
And of course this can be linked to sort of lower levels of knowledge, less willingness to follow the rules and so on.
So how big did that group get? It was still quite small.
So when we first started to measure it, measure it, I think it was about 5%.
And by the end of the fieldwork, I think it had reached 15% to roughly 15%.
So it was you know, it's not it's not a huge group within society, but the fact that it was growing was still a concern.
Yes. Yes. So that study finished before the vaccination programme.
So yes, it did. Yes. And we we, we thought about continuing it, but that would have been quite complicated because we,
we start off with a panel of a certain size and people dropouts over time and eventually in a quiz, you need to talk to the same people.
Over time, you end up with a group that's too small really to to make any sort of sort of meaningful claims about the population.
And so the projected that project had had had finished in a few months before the vaccination programme started.
But we were, we were still interested in,
in attitudes towards vaccines because of course they were still talked about at the time and we did have some data on,
on people's hypothetical willingness to get a vaccine.
And have you been able to ask questions relevant to the pandemic in your bigger news survey?
Yes.
I mean, we we we also the six country study that we conducted in in April 2020, we were able to repeat in 2021 with it with eight countries this time.
And we asked many of the same questions so we could see sort of a yearly change.
And by that point, we were able to include questions on on vaccination because people knew the programme.
It started in some countries and also people were much better informed.
It was less hypothetical than than it was. So we were able to to include some of those.
And also, yes, in the in the digital news report, we had some questions on on coronavirus as well, but normally a bit broader than.
The questions that we had in the coronavirus sort of focussed studies.
And did you see much change between 2020 and 2021 and the kinds of things that we were seeing?
Yes, it's difficult to sort of capture it in one sentence, but I think it uses many sense.
But essentially, I mean, it's not really a surprise.
But we saw in the in the data that we were looking at over time, we did see a year later that people were using far less news on coronavirus.
That's not that's perhaps not a surprise. But we did also see declines in in trust.
So not just among news organisations, but also most other sources of information about the crisis.
So governments, politicians, international health organisations, scientists.
In some cases, these declines went huge. But it was it was certainly certain that there's any evidence of it.
And I think by that point, even though these scientists in particular were very highly trusted,
I think perhaps there was a small part of the population that had perhaps sort of picked up on the the sort of
natural uncertainty that goes with with with with a situation like this and added perhaps lost trust after,
you know, sort of mistakes were made and so on. But still the most trusted sources of information in almost every country.
And as we as as I mentioned, we also asked questions on vaccines.
And in particular, we're interested in in people's belief, in misinformation, about about vaccines.
And there that the picture is quite encouraging.
We found relatively low levels of the belief in in some of the most widely disseminated sort of false claims about about vaccines.
And the Bill Gates is trying to put a yes to that that kind of thing, but also about some of the the sort of the the health risks and so on.
And we found relatively low levels of a belief in that which was encouraging.
And I think that broadly tallies with the the data on on on uptake and also data not from
us but from other sources about vaccine hesitancy decreasing quite a lot over time.
And as the as the vaccine program sort of, you know, had demonstrably, demonstrably was working.
So I think that they sort of it aligned to that as well. Mm hmm.
So what sort of things? Have a brief pause.
Do you think the coffee men know? It's it's it's a it's still probably a bit hot.
And you've mentioned that other organisations have been doing similar research.
How has your research become more collaborative as a result of the pandemic?
Has it prompted you to form wider links with other organisations or have you always been working?
I think many of the the links that we already had we use during the coronavirus research.
So for example on the on the digital news report by we were studying lots of different countries.
You know, we, we don't claim to be able to understand all of those countries, you know, in this to those people on the ground.
And so we have a network of partners in the in those countries who help us understand some of the data and also formulate the questions.
And and we were able to draw on that network when we were looking at Corona virus as well.
And the other organisations that we use for that kind of virus research are fact checkers.
We we drew a lot on their work.
And I've also mentioned Ofcom already who who do an enormous amount of media research in the UK and they and their sort of their work,
which they were also kind of publishing in real time like we were trying to do, helped it inform, inform what we were doing as well.
And of course there were a handful of other projects doing similar things.
So the Winton Centre for Risk at the University of Cambridge,
and they were looking at some things not with a focus on the media but with study, with a focus on and public attitudes towards Corona virus.
And so I think those saw that those were the main.
The major projects and main organisations that we were not collaborating with directly, but sort of communicating with them and looking at their work.
Mm hmm. And who would you say are the main consumers of your research?
Who? Who you said at the start when you wanted to do something to help.
Hmm. Who is using the kind of data that you generate?
And we see our main audience as a mixture of journalists and others that work for news organisations,
policymakers, commentators, observers who are interested in, in, in developments, in news, in the media.
So an example of that might be people who writes about tech or perhaps even work for big tech companies and and and also academics and the academic.
The reports that we publish, I think, are we hope the academics read them,
but that they're mainly designed and written in a way that the people who don't have sort of academic social science expertise can understand.
And we have, you know, we publish academic articles as well for that for the academic audience.
But I think we see it quite broadly.
And I think we we certainly aim to act as a as a as a bridge between research that is conducted to academic standards and and and policymakers,
journalists, etc. Mm hmm. And how do you think your findings have have influenced policy?
Well, we particularly during the beginning of the the UK project,
we we had a lot of media coverage that was picked up by politicians during Prime Minister's questions.
For example, we were mentioned in one of those and also I gave evidence to an inquiry by the Public Affairs and something
something committee will have to check on that which was doing an inquiry into the use of data during the pandemic.
And I gave evidence that based on research in the UK.
Mm hmm. So do you. Yeah. I mean, really, I suppose because I'm still thinking about this article I read,
but it's suggesting that the pandemic will end when people stop looking at that dashboards.
I mean, can people have too much data, too much information?
I mean, I think that it's possible.
And and particularly when there's so much uncertainty like there was at the beginning of the dataset extent there is now as well.
But certainly at the beginning of the pandemic, the huge amount of uncertainty and there was a lot of data.
So there was data coming from multiple countries on cases, all of which were being measured in a slightly different way.
Also, you know, hospitalisations, etc.
And and it was easy at that point to use that data and arrive at the misleading conclusion, even with, you know,
people with the best will in the world and also sort of, you know, sometimes experts in the in the topic with it with a new situation.
I think it was very difficult.
And, you know, if experts are finding it difficult and this uncertainty evolves, then the public will will also likely struggle with it as well.
Whether that means there was too much information, I don't know.
But I can certainly see the risk. And of course, this is in part where the infodemic comes from and why the W.H.O. started to use it.
And I think and I think there was some in some instances of that, as I said.
But there's an equally suppressing problem in not not so much in the UK,
but in other in some other countries where there's a real lack of data and a lack of transparency around the data that does exist.
And, of course, that's that's a serious problem as well. Mm hmm.
So turning, but it's more personally.
So how did the first lockdown impact on what you were able to do?
Um, well, I certainly remember at the beginning of the pandemic when the UK started,
well not the beginning but the when, when the UK went into lockdown,
a huge amount of uncertainty around how it would work and whether even whether sort of,
you know, sort of big parts of society might cease to function.
And that was certainly a concern. And I know people around me as well.
But we're thinking along similar lines. And I think it's it's easy to forget how how sort of real some of those risks felt right at the beginning.
And in terms of working it,
that that part of it was was but was relatively straightforward just because most people and the research team of the institute there,
they used to working from home, you know, in their previous jobs, they perhaps worked from home a little bit as well.
And social scientists can do quite a lot with just their laptop.
So in one sense, a lot could carry on as normal.
Other things became almost impossible. So face to face sort of qualitative research wasn't an option.
We had to move online and we did that in some of the research,
not just on the digital news report, but on a parallel project called the Trust in News Project,
where we we went, we wanted to do face to face interviews and just just weren't able to able to do them.
So there are there are some sort of practical aspects of of research that that became much harder.
But the day to day work, I was quite private of the people I work with who were able to adapt to using, you know,
video conferencing software, doing everything by email, accessing, you know, the university systems remotely.
And it was it wasn't easy, but it was it that wasn't the most challenging part.
And I think. What was the most challenging part? Well, just just everything to do with that.
The social interactions that you miss that I said I really believe that they're important when it comes to generating ideas for research.
And if brainstorming sessions to come up with questions to include in the survey, things like this, which just don't really work well online.
And yeah, I think and I think that combined with the, you know, the of challenges of working from home,
which personally I'm relatively fortunate but for those you had children during home schooling you know
perhaps as or sharing a sort of small flat with their partner who's who's who's working there as well,
that kind of thing. And there are of course, people on our on our team who are in that situation.
So I think they would have certainly found that difficult. Mm hmm.
Has there been any positive outcomes that we've all got extremely familiar with working remotely?
You know, I mean, sometimes it is just more convenient.
Do you think it's something that's going to stay part of your, um. The package of things that.
Guy. Can you work in the future? Yes, I think people are different and some people struggle with the idea of making a payment for others.
It's it's it's really a kind of blessing.
I mean, people often don't like commuting.
They they perhaps sort of don't feel like they thrive in an office environment and prefer to work at a slightly different pace remotely.
And that's some of the feedback that we've got. Not not necessarily the industry, but in the in the sort of the DPL more widely.
And so I think it's it seems a lot of people and I think it makes sense, therefore,
to to think about how that sort of hybrid working can, can can carry on.
But I think about travel because I mean you do a lot of your work has an international.
Yeah. Where you're doing much travelling for did. Yes.
Yeah. When, when we're covering lots of different countries eventually,
you know the people in those countries who want to hear what you find because you know,
we can't put it all the data from, you know, a 46 country study into into a report.
So there's lots that isn't isn't included and maybe you can do a kind of deep dive and on to countries and people are
interested in that but also and you know kind of international I of the European Parliament in ASCO etc. they you know,
they they have that based that side of the case.
There is there's travel there to do events there and and sort of meeting with with colleagues often outside of academia.
There was yeah we did a lot of that before the and I still do of course but it's it's that's the kind of thing that that can be done remotely.
And I think it remains to be seen whether whether it's that will go back to sort of in-person events.
But it I think it's increasingly you know, it's something that's that can be done online, I think.
I mean, I suppose with a sort of growing awareness that that climate change pressures suggest that travel should be minimised.
Yes, exactly. Yes. I think this is good arguments there.
And also, you know, now we have a kind of a sort of proof of concept that this kind of thing can be done online.
Then, then, then that might make it easier to to change to change habits.
And what about your working hours? What did you did you distinguish the same or were you working harder than you had to?
The the the, the, the UK project, which was on a kind of two week cycle that was it sounds like that that should be manageable.
And we thought it would be, but it was quite relentless.
As soon as we finished one writing up the results from one to wave the survey, we immediately had to start on the next one.
And that was that was how many of you were working on that? There were four of us.
Myself, Rasmus Nielsen, who's the director of the Institute, a former colleague called Anton, his colleague Acropolis,
who's at the University of Liverpool, and Felix Simon, who is doing a Ph.D. at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Those are the four of us on the team, of course. You know, we have people working on the sort of publications within the industry, right?
But that was on the on the on the research side and the data kept on the work.
People sent questionnaires where you actually imaginable ringing them up or whatever together some of the data.
So the again YouGov where we're administering it and we redesigned the questionnaire
and they and they send it out to that panel and deliver the the results back.
But to do it to do it every every two weeks was and then sort of, you know,
before going into the for the next survey, we wanted to publish the results.
And so we did that in the in the form of what we call fact sheets, which were kind of eight page, eight page summaries of the data.
And it was yeah, that was I would I'd be lying if I said that was a 9 to 5 job.
But other than that, I think it's, it's I for me personally, it's, it's, it's been quite similar and I've.
You know, to spend the time that I would have spent in the office, at home and then and then stopping it at a certain point.
But I often you hear about other colleagues, not necessarily here,
but some in the wider university who who are perhaps whose work has have
changed a bit because it is a less of a barrier between sort of work and home.
And. Good. Do you have any involvement in teaching?
No. I don't discuss that. It's not something that you've done.
But were you involved in any discussions about your department's safety regime
and the measures that were brought in for the opportunity to be with it,
to just stick with it? No, no, not at the department level.
But we we have our own set of policies for this building, which I've been involved in,
to discussions about and making decisions about, about when we come in, when we don't come in and so on.
But in general, we've we've talked quite closely to the to the government side and also the universities policy as well.
Yeah. Yeah. So that wasn't something that caused.
Division within the book among your colleagues? No, no.
I mean, we have tried to be as flexible as possible.
And if and if people if we have policies that that sort of apply across the board.
But if, you know,
people come to stick to those for for for good reasons and and it's within the sort of what's allowed by the university and the government,
then then we can easily accommodate it.
So, I mean, I think a lot of people found the whole lockdown business very hard emotionally and psychologically.
But do you think the fact that you had a specific project to work on that, as you said, any you thought would help contributed to your own wellbeing?
Yeah, I mean, I think it did.
And just because you really got something to focus on and of course it's it's related to the thing you might otherwise be worried about.
But I think it is possible to to sort of detach slightly from that and focus on on on doing the work.
And particularly at the beginning, as I mentioned, I really thought it was, you know, we could help.
I mean, not of course, not to the same extent as doctors and scientists working in other, you know, other areas.
But as you know, in a small way, I thought, you know,
it would be useful to have this information and that, you know, that that's obviously motivating.
And I think I think it probably did.
Yeah. Overall helped to have something like these projects to to focus on.
Mm hmm. Did you did you ever feel personally threatened by the virus?
You did say when you talked about a worry about bits of society, actually.
Yeah, it made it sound slightly silly to think about it like that now in hindsight.
But I certainly remember thinking that at the time I was less so.
I think even even very early on it was quite clear that this was a virus or a disease.
That that that that really the risk profile for those in the older age groups is obviously much higher.
And and I think if you're, you know, sort of my age, then then it was quite clear that it was less of a less serious for many people, younger people.
So I personally wasn't worried about about the virus for my own sake.
But of course, you worry about, you know,
your parents or the people you know and you interact with who perhaps have it have a greater risk for for whatever reason.
So that was that was a concern. And then I did you know, you do wonder whether, for example, near the beginning when when, you know,
food started disappearing from the shelves in supermarkets, that that was the sort of main concern that things would start to go wrong on that front.
And, you know, in the end, I do think it was as bad as some people feared.
But there was a brief time when it when it looked quite like it looked very serious.
Okay. I think we just about got that. Just got a couple of final question.
Yeah. So how has the work you've done on COVID raised new questions that you'd be
interested in exploring in the future in relation to news consumption and trust?
And so, yes, I mean, I think it will have to excuse me.
I think it will have a long term effect. And it's actually still too early for some of our projects to have picked up on picked up on this.
But I think, you know, for example, with something like trust,
it will it will have an effect on the on the sort of consumption side and the public side on that, you know, in different ways.
It will certainly have an effect on what news organisations do, what journalists do.
There's already been quite a big shift in into the working practices and the ways that news organisations are run that I don't think will,
I don't think are going to change back and some of that can be, some of that can be positive.
So you know, you can imagine, for example, how news organisations, if people are working remotely,
journalists can be based outside of London more easily and sort of have a closer connection with the community that they're reporting on and so on.
So some of that could be positive. That also, I think is the issue of where the coronavirus has and the pandemic has kind of accelerated
some of the the sort of declines that news organisations are struggling with,
said that the decline of print, for example, we saw that that that was very badly affected by lockdown for obvious reasons.
But I think, you know,
that could have been that could have broken habits for some people and that there could be an acceleration of the what was already declining.
And then, you know, the debates around misinformation on social media, etc.,
I think amplified by something like coronavirus because of the clear link between, you know, risks to people's health as a consequence.
And that may have when we look back, it may have been something that accelerated the move to more sort of content,
moderation, different policies from social networks, more action from governments to to deal with it and so on.
Mm hmm. And has the experience changed your attitude or approach to your work and all the things you'd like to see change in the future?
I mean, it's made me think certainly more about, you know, what, what the right working environment is for different people and how, you know,
it's wrong to just assume that everyone thinks the same about, you know, working from home or working from the floor, from the office and so on.
But certainly think differently about that. And I'm sorry, what was the second part of the questions that you'd like to see change in the future?
And what I mean, I hope they're supposed to sort of building on that.
That's working practices, not just in academia,
but but everywhere can can become a bit more bit more flexible to to sort of meet people's different circumstances and.
And I was thinking about this in news media, and it's been different in different countries.
But I think on the whole in the UK, the way that vaccines in particular have been covered and reported on has been has been quite good.
And, you know, I think that model and that and that the sort of serious seriousness that is attached to the vaccines,
it would be nice if that if that approach could be applied to to other topics as well,
because I think that the news media and to a certain extent the government have been doing doing a good job.
For example, the government dashboard, it took a while to arrive, but when it arrived, it was it was it was very useful.
And I think, you know, that that could could, you know, sort of show how the similar you know,
how similar situations could be dealt with if we learn something from it.
Mm hmm. And, I mean, I suppose, again, climate change is the obvious example that people people are not saying,
you know, we've shown we can act actively against one threat.
We ought to be able to. That's right. I like that attitude.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good.