Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

The last weeks have seen a number of journalists who have participated in Dart Center programs winning awards for their reporting and publishing stories on issues of trauma and journalism. If there are any we missed, please add them in the comments.

• CNN wire editor/writer Moni Basu (Ochberg Fellow, 2007) won the Joseph Galloway Award for Distinguished Reporting, the top prize in the annual Military Reporters & Editors journalism contest for her eight-part series "Chaplain Turner's War" at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
• Center for Public Integrity staff writer Kristen Lombardi (Ochberg Fellow, 2003) won the Society for Environmental Journalists' award for Outstanding Online Reporting for her investigation of "The Hidden Costs of Clean Coal."
• Former managing editor of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Ottawa Bureau George Hoff (Ochberg Fellow, 2007) talks about his Ochberg Fellowship experience and the need for Canadian journalists to learn about violence and traumatic stress at the Canadian Journalism Project.
• And Michael McKenna, senior reporter at The Australian (and attendee of seminars with Dart Centre Australasia), narrates his reporting on the devastation in Samoa and the attending "War between ethics, compassion and getting the story":

Renee and I went to work, she taking photographs as I wrote down what I saw. As I moved to the side, following a group of three officers out far on the right flank, a policeman bent down about 1m away from me and lifted a fallen palm frond.

A little boy, about three, lay dead. The policeman called out and I backed off as police and then his grief-stricken parents came running, falling to their knees, clutching their beautiful, long-haired boy.

If you don't get emotional at that sort of scene, as I and everyone else did, you shouldn't be there. It's a terrible experience, one that "writes itself", as reporters say but, like some of the other times, will haunt me.