MEDIA GUIDE FOR PANDEMIC PODS MODERATORS

Talking and working with reporters can be a powerful way to raise awareness about the impossible situations that parents, caregivers, and teachers are being put into, and it’s an important part of Pandemic Pods’ advocacy efforts to push for better options and guidance from our government and schools. It can also be tricky to navigate when they’re asking tough questions, so this doc is meant to help you know what to expect, and what Pandemic Pods expects (and doesn’t expect) of you.

As a local chapter moderator, you always have the right to accept or decline reporter requests for interviews that come to you in this capacity. You’re also free to limit and manage the participation of reporters in your chapter, either individually or as a whole.

Here are some notes on engaging with reporters, which we’ll continually work to flesh out and improve:

• Read our Media FAQ - Get familiar with our Media FAQ, and you’re invited to share this link with any reporters in response to their first (or any other) contact. This can save you time and help start conversations on the right foot, especially with regard to the most common difficult areas of questions around equity and safety.
• Track contacts + media mentions - We invite you to add info about any reporter contacts, interviews, and media mentions to this sheet to help us collectively understand and track our media and advocacy efforts.
• Let us know in the Moderator group - Feel free to post about your interviews  + appearances in the Moderator group, so we can celebrate your successes! AND when you have a difficult interview or otherwise run into trouble, we encourage you to share that as well, so we can help advise, learn from your experience, and prepare for future media engagements. This is a work in progress and there’s no expectation of perfection.
• Be heads up; know that a reporters’ job is to report - Their job includes: asking tough questions; having the latitude to quote what you say on the record; and maintaining journalistic integrity by producing their story without further approval from us.

• Know that they can quote anything you say, once they’ve explicitly established that a conversation is “on the record.” If  you want to talk with a reporter but not be quoted, you need to explicitly ask them to go  “off the record” or “on background”--and even still, it’s a best practice to only say things to reporters that you feel OK about seeing in a news story.
• Along these lines, you may find it helpful to be clear in your mind about how much you want to share about your own family or situation, or any other topic that’s sensitive to you, and be prepared to hold your boundaries in a friendly but firm way. Some people find it helpful to write down some talking points so that  you have something to refer to when you’re on the spot.

• Heed Pandemic Pods Rules - When you choose to talk with a reporter in the capacity of your Pandemic Pods local chapter moderator role, we ask that you be comfortable with our Group Rules as a baseline. In particular, we:

• Primarily serve families, caregivers, and teachers in our groups, not for-profit companies.
• Are a group for people interested in podding. We support difficult conversations about safety and equity (and we aim to do so with care to center the voices of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, lower income, disabled, and other marginalized people). We are not a space for arguments that all podding is inherently and always bad.
• Heed public health guidelines and laws and encourages all members to follow their current local health orders. We also critique with the goal of strengthening, not undermining, civic institutions.
• Support parents’ right to choose and make arrangements to take care of their children. Likewise, we recognize that everyone has their own needs and that the group’s purpose is to support each other with resources and connections, not to question other people’s feelings (i.e. we don’t try to argue that teachers or others shouldn’t be worried for their health.)
• Are not helping people form their pods directly in any way that assumes responsibility for people’s individual choices. There are legal and other requirements that may apply to pod activities, and it’s up to each individual member to make their decisions in these regards.
• In the main group, we allow reporters and researchers to join and seek out people to interview. In order to keep within our group’s privacy guidelines, we ask reporters and researchers to clearly identify themselves in each interaction with members, and to explicitly get permission before quoting anyone or using any content (e.g. screenshots or other) from the group. Please do this as a baseline, and you can further limit or manage how you work with reporters if that’s what’s right for your chapter.