ideastream's Coronavirus Q&A Project

When what started off as coronavirus concerns began ramping up into what would become the global COVID-19 pandemic, ideastream’s health team quickly pivoted from traditional news-gathering and broadcast methods to forge a link between radio listeners/web users and the Cleveland area’s world-class medical experts.

Combining a listener call-in line and web submission form, ideastream invited Northeast Ohioans to ask their most specific, most concerning, most pressing COVID-19 questions and promised to get them answers. At a time when the virus was so new, answers weren’t easily found on Google and not everyone has the ability to call up an infectious disease expert – but that’s what the health team did, and is still doing as vaccine questions continue to pile up.

Answers went out on the airwaves with traditional radio spots as well as on ideastream.org in more than 65 web posts. Across social media platforms, the team created innovative, sharable short videos with COVID-19 answers directly from doctors and infectious disease experts, built specifically for Twitter and Instagram.

The team continues to break the mold of traditional broadcast journalism with the Coronavirus Q&A project by directly following up with as many of the question-askers as possible, via email and phone, creating a conversation and building personal relationships with the community they cover in a time of so much disconnection.