The corona crisis has completely upended higher education. Pressing questions follow each other in rapid succession and students and staff members are looking for answers. What’s next for education and research?

This unprecedented situation not only leads to a sharp rise in visitor numbers at national news organizations, but at media outlets from research and applied sciences universities as well.

Rotterdam University’s Erasmus Magazine, for example, attracted more visitors during the first four months of 2020 alone than they usually do in a year. Vox (Radboud University) says that March is their “best visited month ever,” “all records were broken” at Groningen’s UKrant, and Delta (TU Delft) has 42 percent more pageviews than in the same period last year. Cursor, too, sees a serious increase in those numbers, the English version of its site in particular scores exceptionally high with approximately 30,000 visitors per week, which accounts for more than 70,000 pageviews.

High online activity

Most editorial staffs also received more reactions and op-eds from students and lecturers, via email and social media. The number of visitors seems to stabilize somewhat at this point, the general editors notice. But online activity is still higher than usual.

A number of the general editors estimate that at least 80 percent of news messages published since March are corona-related. That number is even higher for most media, up to no less than 95 percent.