JOHNSON CITY (July 28, 2021) – Dr. Mildred F. (Mimi) Perreault of East Tennessee State
University is the coauthor of a second article examining the work of journalists during
the COVID-19 pandemic. 
“Metajournalistic Discourse as a Stabilizer within the Journalistic Field: Journalistic Practice in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” published in Journalism Practice, a top media and communication journal, was written by Perreault, along with her partner and research colleague, Dr. Gregory P. Perreault of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and Phoebe Maares of the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria.
The authors note that gathering and distributing vital information to the public and mitigating the complexities of the journalism field were challenging to journalists during the pandemic.
“This new study addresses how the journalistic trade press discursively constructed and normalized journalistic practice during the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, UK and Austria,” said Perreault, an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication in ETSU’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a fellow in the Disaster and Community Crisis Center at the University of Missouri, where she earned her Ph.D.
The article explored how journalists in several different countries contextualized the challenges they faced while doing journalism in the pandemic, according to the Botstiber Institute for Austrian American Studies. Gregory Perreault is a 2020-2021 Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna.
Earlier this year, the Perreaults published “Journalists on COVID-19 Journalism: Communication Ecology of Pandemic Reporting” in American Behavioral Scientist, examining how journalists approached coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic.