BAKU, Azerbaijan, Jan.11
Trend:
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has affected media institutions, Trend reports referring to the Journalists' Trade Union of Azerbaijan.
According to the union, journalists around the world were dismissed or their working conditions worsened, and their salaries were cut. In 58 countries of the world, 615 journalists have died from COVID-19.
In Azerbaijan, according to the monitoring results, 117 journalists were infected with COVID-19, and 8 of them died.
The Azerbaijani state has taken a number of steps to reduce the impact of the pandemic on the work of the media, and the program to support small and medium-sized enterprises during the pandemic also affected media entrepreneurs. As part of the program, the media were provided with government support, which stimulated the preservation of jobs in this area.
The State Support Fund for Media Development under the President of Azerbaijan continued to financially support the media, and this became a great additional help for the media, in particular, for newspaper editorial offices.
The monitoring showed that there are no media in Azerbaijan that stopped working because of the pandemic. At the same time, there were job cuts, which covered 4 percent of persons working in the sphere of media.