covering COVID-19 in Canada

Gloria Dickie is a science and environmental  journalist currently based in Vancouver. Her stories on climate change, food sustainability, population, biodiversity conservation and a lot more, have won her awards, with several of her writings published in international publications. In this profile for CFWIJ, Gloria share how COVID-19 has impacted her as a journalist.

Since she works as a freelancer, covering the pandemic has been a “hit and miss” for her.

“Some publications have seen their budgets drop off drastically due to the pandemic, others are overwhelmed with pitches and only assigning to staff writers at the moment. For the first month, the appetite for any non-COVID stories was pretty non-existent. A bunch of freelancers had a Google document circulating with a list of publications no longer accepting freelance work and the list was long,” she shared.

Gloria further adds that has mostly been focused on tapping into the communities that she has worked in before in Asia.

“I recently reached out to some scientists I had connected with in central India. I was wondering what was happening with wild tigers after the announcement that the Bronx Zoo tiger had tested positive for coronavirus. That story ended up in The New York Times. I also spent a lot of time reporting on wildlife rescue centers in Vietnam last year and reached out to those folks when I realized they had essentially lost all their funding from tourism. That story ran in The Guardian.”

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by The Coalition for Women in Journalism

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