The Infomore.cz website has recently won the AMEC Awards, a global competition for media analysts. The project won in the category focused on effective planning, research and evaluation of communication.
The winning team of analysts from both academic and commercial spheres, including the IBA FM MU, has been monitoring media coverage of the COVID-19 epidemic for almost a year and highlighting good and bad journalistic practice in disseminating information on the pandemic. Through the Infomore.cz website, it points to journalists’ poor handling of data, ignorance of medical terminology or the use of inappropriate examples and comparisons.
“When this website was created a year ago as one of the main outputs of our interdisciplinary project, I had no idea how much interest in it would be shown by the professional public, including the prestigious AMEC Awards 2021. It is a wonderful thank you not only to all my colleagues in the Infomore.cz team, but also to the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic for supporting applied research in the field of journalism and media,” says Václav Moravec, project leader from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University.
Apart from quantitative and qualitative media analyses, the website offers a glossary of terms related to COVID-19, including two animated series and recommendations for journalists for quality news and journalistic coverage of the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic represents not only an unprecedented challenge, but also a responsibility for media and journalists. The Infomore.cz website has proven to be an excellent tool to help us better meet this challenge, thanks to the work of our analysts and other experts, and using the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence,” explains Petr Herian, founder and owner of the NEWTON Media company.
As for the general public, the Infomore.cz website aims to strengthen media literacy as well as health literacy. The Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic and the Association of General Practitioners of the Czech Republic have shown interest in sharing their knowledge base (a quarter of all members participated in a large survey on infodemic in the Czech Republic within one month).
“The project shows that the fight against disinformation makes sense. The interest of the professional and general public clearly shows the potential of the project’s outputs. The team of researchers plans to follow up with the preparation of content related to infodemic on the National Health Information Portal, where it will reach other readers and help them form their opinion over truthful and data-based information,” adds Martin Komenda from the Faculty of Medicine of the Masaryk University.
For the first time in history, the 16th MEFANET conference was held outside the Czech Republic in the Slovak Congress Hotel Centrum in Košice. The whole event was held in the spirit of artificial intelligence in medical education, virtual reality and there were also short presentations by regular participants about their improvement and modernization of teaching.
Over the past three years, not only has a wave of severe respiratory disease swept over virtually all of human civilization, but also a wave of vast amounts of information related to it. A new book by Václav Moravec and Ladislav Dušek deals with this phenomenon that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic and often caused more damage than the virus alone.
