Americas

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck Mexico, the country was already one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists, according to CPJ research.

Washington state was the first COVID-19 hotspot in the United States. Since its first case was reported on January 21, more than 10,000 people have been infected with the virus, and at least 511 have died.

Dayanna Monroy reports for the Teleamazonas television station in the port city of Guayaquil, the epicenter of Ecuador’s COVID-19 outbreak. She and her colleagues have recently reported on bodies piling up in morgues and being left for days in the streets and in people’s homes, the results of overwhelmed hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries.

When university campuses across the U.S. began to send students home in response to growing coronavirus concerns, student journalists did not close their student papers, pack up, and leave. Instead, many student journalists across the country have emerged as their communities’ local coronavirus news reporters. The student journalists at The Independent Florida Alligator at the…

Reuters correspondent Robenson Sanon has been covering life in his home country of Haiti for over 10 years.

In early February, only eight weeks ago but in a parallel universe that no longer exists, I invited Billie Sweeney, a senior staff editor at The New York Times, to tour the new CPJ office and visit with old friends. For nine years, from 2004 to 2013, Billie worked as CPJ’s editorial director, overseeing all…

For Sadef Ali Kully, a housing and land use reporter for the nonprofit news outlet City Limits, meeting with sources in-person was an integral part of covering her beat in New York City. However, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kully has needed to rethink how to perform the basics of her job.

In early March, Jon Gerberg was in Detroit, Michigan, covering the Democratic primaries as a video journalist with The Washington Post. But as the COVID-19 virus has spread in the United States and around the world, Gerberg’s coverage has changed to focus on the pandemic.

In the three years since Hurricane Maria hit the island, Puerto Rico has experienced a financial, political, and public health crisis, but reporter Bárbara Figueroa Rosa told CPJ that these events “have no comparison” to the impact the coronavirus pandemic could have on the U.S. territory.

Governments all over the world have been considering cellphone surveillance to help track and contain the spread of the coronavirus.