Reporting a community tragedy can impact media workers, their managers, and their loved ones acutely. Those impacts can be potentially immediate, delayed or long-term. As each of these media workers – and their managers –  digest the ramifications, personal and professional, of this tragedy, the Dart Centre Asia Pacific is offering some tips and resources that may help them report ethically and safely.

Death, violence, war, terrorism, natural disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic - at some point within the past year many journalists within Asia Pacific will have reported on a story involving interviewees who had experienced a traumatic event. This tip sheet brings together the collective experience of the Dart Centre Asia Pacific’s principal trainers to provide some general advice for interviewing in the aftermath of trauma, and recommendations for before, during, and after the interview.

In September 2020, Amnesty International halted its operations in India, with the UK-based organisation publishing a report warning of a coordinated effort to silence journalists and activists in the region. Since then, the situation has deteriorated from bad to worse for journalists in Kashmir, culminating with the recent arrest of Fahad Shah.

Dart Centre Asia Pacific is delighted to announce several programs supported by Google News Initiative Asia (GNI) for 2021-2022, including an Australian First Nations Journalists’ program, a program to establish an Asia Pacific Peer Support Network, a trauma and resilience training program for freelance journalists, and an emergency response fund for trauma-related psychosocial support.

Trauma expert Dr. Cait McMahon, OAM, will retire from her role as Dart Centre Asia Pacific Managing Director later this year, following a 30-year career helping media workers better understand the impact of trauma on themselves and on those they report on. “In every way Cait is a world leader in this field – through her research, her work in newsrooms and her clinical expertise," said Dart Centre Asia-Pacific Chair and veteran journalist Karen Percy. "Media workers around the world have benefited from her passion and her skill.”

A collaboration between ACOS Alliance and Dart Centre Asia Pacific, this guide is designed to help editors and managers understand and support their teams. It is divided into five sections covering both general information and specific suggestions and tips for working with freelance journalists. Click here to download the full guide.

The Dart Centre Asia Pacific In Ten vodcast is a series of ten-minute chats with journalists, camera operators and other news professionals from across the globe about self-care and reporting in the time of coronavirus. How are these journalists caring for themselves and their craft in the midst of this pandemic? What unique reporting challenges have emerged? And what’s stayed the same? What lessons have they learned that they will carry forward beyond the pandemic?

More than threee million people have been infected with coronavirus disease (COVID-19), fueling a worldwide pandemic. As of this writing, at least 200,000 people have died. As the numbers continue to rise, we have assembled resources for journalists on covering disaster and epidemic, interviewing victims and survivors, and working with colleagues exposed to traumatic events in English and Chinese.

For journalists on every beat, managing personal boundaries and safety can pose difficult choices and challenges. Women journalists in particular contend with unwanted presumptions, sexual harassment and the threat of violence. The Dart Center asked nine leading women in journalism to talk about the impact of these challenges on their work, and to reflect on their own best practices. This video is the result.