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Beimeng Fu is an award-winning video journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Shanghai, China. She has covered stories out of the Greater China Area, the U.S. and its Asian diasporas, and East Africa. Her bylines have appeared in The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, The California Sunday Magazine, ABC News, Quartz, South China Morning Post, Sixth Tone, Tencent Guyu Project, and more. During COVID, she recorded the collective mood of people who experienced the two-month-long lockdown in Shanghai in the Spring of 2022. The documentary, “Thank You For Your Cooperation,” was named a finalist in the 2023 Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA).
In this interview, Fu recalled the ground situation in China where COVID was discovered first. She covered the pandemic news and its impact on migrant workers, residents in Wuhan, education, and rural parts and frontier cities of China. She endured a two-month total lockdown in her apartment in Shanghai while producing two video projects about these lockdowns from home. She also commented on the difficulties of producing video and documentary projects in a highly censored media environment when mobility was tracked and restricted by the government.
April Zhu is a freelance journalist based in Kenya. Her work focuses on gender, urban inequality, and the Chinese diaspora in Kenya. She is a senior editor at Guernica Magazine where she edits interviews and produces a podcast “Until Everyone is Free”. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books Daily, Foreign Policy, The Baffler Magazine, The South China Morning Post Magazine, VOA News, and others.
Zhu's COVID reporting helped people understand the systematic issues in the healthcare system in Africa. She recalled the early lockdowns in Kenya, government responses, and police violence. She criticized Sinophobia and racial discrimination and commented on the financial challenges and lack of institutional support for being a freelancer. Regardless, she's grateful for growing professionally during the pandemic. She urges the future generation to connect their crisis reporting with structural issues and make an impactful change.
Ankita M. Kumar is a journalist, analyst, and product manager. During COVID, she covered several high-profile investigative stories on the pandemic in India for Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster. In 2020, she received a grant from the National Geographic Society's COVID-19 emergency fund to complete a written report on equal access to health care for women in the current Gurugram's urban slums. Kumar was relocated to the United States in 2021, and graduated with a master's degree from Northwestern University, specializing in media innovation and content strategy.
Kumar published several investigative stories that focused on underrepresented groups during the pandemic, including women in Gurugram's slums, cremation urns workers, migrant workers, and diamond polishers. In this interview, she revealed the unique challenges from family, community, and sources she endured to practice journalism as a woman in India. A journalist and a social worker, Kumar advised spending time building a trustworthy relationship with sources and maintaining objectivity in one's journalistic pursuit. She reviewed the difficulties of covering COVID at its peak while enduring the loss of a family member to the virus. The personal loss put her in a unique position to tell other people's suffering with compassion and empathy. She left future generations with lessons of loss and gains.
Amanda Morris is a staff reporter at the Washington Post in the United States. Before joining the Post in August 2022, Morris was an inaugural disability reporting fellow for The New York Times. Previously, she covered science, politics, and national news for outlets, including The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, and National Public Radio (NPR).
In this interview Morris shared her experiences covering the early months of the pandemic for The Arizona Republic. She recalled challenges such as performing field work as a visual journalist, maintaining work and work-life balance, mental health, and combating public distrust in science reporting and online harassment. She recommended practical tips for organizations and the general public to recognize women journalists' challenges and contributions in reporting the pandemic.
Aliya Bashir is an independent journalist covering India and India-administered Kashmir with a focus on human rights, gender justice, women’s issues, the environment, healthcare, education and minorities. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Time, Reuters, Global Press Journal, Global Health Now, and The New Humanitarian among many others. She is the winner of the 2015 Schizophrenia Research Foundation-Press Institute of India “Media for Mental Health” award for best reporting on mental health issues in India. A HEFAT trainee, she has won reporting grants from the International Women’s Media Foundation and Population Reference Bureau.
In this interview, Bashir recalled her experiences covering the impact of COVID-19 on women and their children. She reflected on the lack of women's representation in mainstream media, vaccination and health data, and the decision-making process in families. Despite the challenges of reaching sources in remote and vulnerable conditions and with little support as a freelance journalist, her reporting brought awareness to the gender gap and urged officials to collect data and build women-centric vaccination campaigns. She also commended more recognition of women journalists' work and minimizing the pay disparity between genders.
Alessandra Bergamin is an award-winning Australian investigative journalist who divides her time between Melbourne and Los Angeles. Bergamin covers the intersection of environmental conflict and human rights around the world. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, In These Times, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, and The New Yorker.com, among others. In 2022, Bergamin was honored as a Distinguished Journalist by the Society of Professional Journalists, Los Angeles in the newspaper/print (smaller circulation) category. She has received fellowships and grants from many entities to investigate environmental and human rights issues.
In this interview, Bergamin reviewed her experiences and takeaways from reporting labor and human trafficking issues during the pandemic. She shared approaches and advice to developing and cultivating sources who reside remotely and in hard-to-reach communities. She also commented on the importance of mental health and the challenges of being a freelancer and woman journalist. Finally, she reflected on the meaning of the pandemic to her personally and professionally. She called for more understanding of the differential impact of the pandemic on different populations.
