Media Resilience Scanner

"News professionals routinely cover crises and disasters that affect others. But few take seriously the need to prepare themselves for events likely to threaten their organization's viability and ability to continue reporting when the public needs them most."

Developed by DW Akademie, the Media Resilience Scanner is designed to be a comprehensive online crisis preparation, management, and recovery tool for news organisations. It offers step-by-step guidance to media professionals through a process that allows them to realistically evaluate and plan for the risks they face, manage crises as they occur, and assess and address the residual risks to news media viability that follow major disruptions. Crises can include external threats - authoritarian crackdowns, conflict, natural disasters, man-made disasters, and digital attacks - as well as internal crises.

The DW Akademie discussion paper "Weathering Crisis. Building Media Resilience" (see Related Summaries, below) stresses the need for careful preparation to increase organisational resilience. This tool was developed to assist in this preparation process. Through a series of questions, the tool allows media managers and others in charge of crisis preparation and continuity to identify the key measures needed to withstand possible economic and operational shocks to their organisations. In addition to questions around the potential risks a media organisation may face, it asks questions about financial management, news operations, human resources, crisis communication, and digital security, which help users build their own individual crisis plan. This plan includes allocating responsibilities and creating deadlines for their staff. At the end, the Scanner generates a customised crisis preparation and management plan as a downloadable PDF.

The Media Resilience Scanner draws on lessons learned by over 30 media organisations all over the world - including in Myanmar, Iraq, the Philippines, El Salvador, Lebanon, the United States, and Kenya - that have successfully steered their way through internal and external crises, conflicts, and natural disasters. The Scanner can also be used as a crisis and disaster training tool for news organisation managers, staff, and journalists.