The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative and BOOM Charlotte announce a new project titled The Pandemic: Stories of COVID-19, a graphic novel that tells the stories of people in the Charlotte, North Carolina region who have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
This multimedia reporting project will bring together the arts community and local media to reach new audiences.
The Charlotte Journalism Collaborative is made up of six major media companies and other local institutions. Those media companies include The Charlotte Observer, La Noticia, QCity Metro, QNotes, WCNC-TV, and WFAE 90.7 FM, as well as the James L. Knight School of Communication at Queens University of Charlotte, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, and Free Press, a community-engagement organization. The CJC is supported by the Local Media Project, an initiative launched by the Solutions Journalism Network with support from the Knight Foundation to strengthen and reinvigorate local media ecosystems.
Since March, the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative has focused on addressing the immediate needs of Charlotte residents during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing news and information that can keep communities safe and healthy. Graphic journalism or comics journalism, as defined by this project, is a form of journalism that covers news and nonfiction events using the framework of comics, a combination of words and drawn images.
The project will be divided into eight chapters that will be individually released on Instagram at both Charlotte Journalism Collaborative (@CLTJournalism) and BOOM Charlotte (@clt_boom), in addition to www.charlottejournalism.org. A full printed version is currently being planned for 2021.
