A recent study by researchers from East Tennessee State University and Appalachian State University confirmed two things we journalists already knew about our industry. For their work looking at the COVID-19 pandemicâs effects on news reporting, Dr. Mimi Perreault and Dr. Gregory Perreault interviewed working journalists and examined articles and discussions about journalism in industry-specific publications and websites. What they found was, much like everyone else, the people who gather and report news are taking this yearlong pandemic day by day. Before March of last year, we didnât know the term âsocial distancing,â and calculating seven-day averages was not something we could do so effortlessly. Since the start of the global pandemic, weâve had to learn new and complex concepts and then figure out how to explain them to our readers.