Proposal: I’m a Survivor – How Young People are Coping during Coronavirus

a proposal for a feature story to help young people dealing with the coronavirus crisis

Corona Hotel in Israel
Corona Hotel in Israel. Image: All Rights Reserved to @amit_hair_style

The Coronavirus is a major issue within Australia and worldwide at the moment, when no end to be seen and people trying to stay sane. I’m interested in writing a feature story exploring the different ways young people are coping during the COVID-19.

Selected Publication

The Coronavirus crisis is almost the only topic on the news for the past two months all over the world when the main question is where is the exit? However, while in isolation and nowhere to go, people try to find different ways to cope with their new reality. Young people have found various ways to deal with the crisis and I’d like to share some of the creative ways to have some fun while social distancing for Junkee publication.

Audience

This feature will target Junkee‘s audience, written simplicity and with humour. Junkee is a satire website that specialises in Youth Media. It aims to provoke and give its 2 million young audience a fresh take on what’s going in their world.

At the moment there are tons of publications and news stories all over the internet examining the Coronavirus crisis from multiple angles. However, this story will attack from a different angle while focusing on the young people perspective and providing them tips to handle the situation.

Structure

The article will include a short review on the coronavirus crisis and three main activities that have emerged on social media:

1.Welcome to Hotel Corona: Infected patients who don’t need medical treatment were sent to hotels away from home. Most of them are young people who got back from a big trip abroad and now document their new lives in Hotel Corona via Instagram.

The Corona Hotel Diaries. Video: All Rights Reserved to @amit_hair_style

2.Tone It Up: Fitness teachers started to upload free classes online so people can do while isolation. Some of the classes happen on Instagram live and some on YouTube, which I’ll be focusing on.

Yoga with Cassandra YouTube channel

3.Wardrobe full of clothes but nothing to wear: In order to do some good there are options to volunteer remotely. Facebook has a COVID-19 feature with information about the spread worldwide including a “People Offering Help” post where you can upload supplies or different kinds of help you can offer, stating your location, adding images and ways of contact. If you’re planning to clean your wardrobe, this is a way to donate your clothes.

Facebook COVID-19 Information Centre

Sources & Multimedia

I will be collecting visual information from various social media apps, such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in addition to articles and documents, official reports and interviews to give a formal perspective of how severe the situation is. At the moment, I’m going to use the sources below:

About Gal Matana-Dahari 8 Articles
Exchange student in Master of Media & Communication at the University of Sydney. From the Hebrew University in Israel. Web Manager and owner of the samplegal.com blog, @galmatana

3 Comments

  1. Good work! I am very interested in the topic of your article. Indeed, COVID-19 is a topic that is currently being reported by different major media. You have done a very good job in selecting publications and audiences to narrow the target audience. At the same time, this group will also be interested in your topic-how to make life more interesting and how to explore different ways during COVID-19. So I think your story is very newsworthy.

    In addition, make a small suggestion, your featured image pixels are too low, which make readers hard to understand what you want to exprss through the picture.

    • Hi Lu, thank you so much for your feedback! I didn’t finish my assessment yet, just wanted to see how it looks like on WordPress lol! Maybe by the end of the day you can have a look again 🙂

  2. Well done Gal. I like how you have chosen to focus on the youth or millennial age group, choosing to analyse how they are coping during this pandemic. I particularly think the volunteering or ways to help section of your article is important and interesting. Younger generations have actually been condemned in the media for ‘not taking coronavirus seriously’ and I think by giving examples of how they are in fact helping is an excellent idea. Perhaps even a further exploration of the financial impact on the youth, who have taken the hardest fall due to casual work essentially being cancelled will boost your article even more. Great job!

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