The pandemic rewrote the way that science stories were told. Virology and immunology became front-page news items; people got used to refreshing experimental vaccine trackers for by-the-day updates. Twitter became a source for data and expertise, and preprints—even standalone figures—became fodder for entire articles. To navigate this new landscape, journalists and the scientists they spoke to had to juggle new communication tactics, and figure out new strategies to identify and weed out misinformation and disinformation—an especially difficult task when so much was being learned by the second.

Bio: Katherine J. Wu is a staff writer at The Atlantic where she covers science. She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from Harvard University. Before joining The Atlantic, she was a science and health reporter for The New York Times focused on COVID-19. In 2020, she won the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists.