Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Hometown Catastrophe

How Newsrooms Can Prepare

By Bruce Shapiro

 Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro offers advice to journalists.

"Hokie Pride" Motivates Virginia Tech Student Paper's Coverage of Tragedy

By Joe Hight

Robert Bowman recently faced the biggest news coverage challenge of his young life.

The Dreadful Burden

By Gary Tippet

The Port Arthur massacre was Australia's worst mass murder, with 35 people killed. I had been covering it all week and, I thought, coping well. But as I stood at that tree I suddenly found myself weeping.

Local Tragedy, National Spotlight

By Joe Hight

What happens to a community when a major traumatic event turns life upside down? How do news organizations responsibly cover the event and help the community recover?

The Port Arthur Massacre, April 28, 1996

By Judy Tierney

Just about everyone remembers where they were when they recall some cataclysmic event in their life. When Hobart man Martin Bryant began indiscriminately shooting people at one of Tasmania’s iconic tourism destinations I was entertaining 35 women at home. I was hosting a “girls” lunch for my journalist colleagues and some friends who held responsible positions in government.

Training to Cover Terror

By Stephen Jukes

Students at Bournemouth Media School perform journalistic exercises in response to a staged terror attack on London.

The “Balibo Five”—30 Years Later

By Cait McMahon

Shirley Shackleton—whose husband, Australian journalist Greg Shackleton, was murdered in East Timor in 1975—has been asking the same question for 30 years: “I want to know what happened to my husband and his colleagues,” she says. “Why were these people murdered in cold blood?”

BTK Killer: Remembering the Victims

By Joe Hight

The Wichita Eagle newsroom recently faced a coverage situation that few newspapers encounter: A serial killer resurfacing many years after his last killing.

Close Encounters

By Gary Tippet

In February 1972, I was 18 years old, a couple of months out of high school and beginning a cadetship at the now-dead Sun News Pictorial in Melbourne. It was my first week at the paper and I had been sent for the day to watch police rounds at work.

A Different Approach to a Murder Trial

By Jesse Tarbert

On Sept. 23, 2002, 18-year-old Rachel Rose Burkheimer was murdered by a group of men and buried in a field in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, east of Everett, Wash. In the months since, the grisly details of the murder have been covered extensively in area newspapers.