As we've mentioned before, the Dart Center Country Contact in Taiwan, Julia Hsu, has been working with her reseach team to translate some of the Dart Center's training materials. We are happy to make her translation of another online self-study unit available. Check out "Covering Terrorism," translated for traditional Chinese readers, especially in Taiwan.
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter is frustrated and angry. At a forum and panel conversation held on Monday, May 3, she insisted that our country's current mental health system is broken, despite the $120 billion dollars our federal government spends annually on direct mental health care.
The violence that surrounds drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border makes it among the most dangerous and difficult beats any journalist can cover. Twenty six reporters from both sides of the border who cover this beat gathered at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas in Austin, Texas on March 26 and 27, 2010 to discuss how to stay safe and get stories out at a seminar sponsored by the McCormick Foundation.
Nominations are now being sought for the fourth annual Mimi Award, a prize that recognizes exceptional work by an editor. The Mimi Award is given each year by The Dart Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting sensitive coverage of victims of violence, composed of Dart Center Ochberg Fellows and winners of the Dart and Mimi awards.
When the Radio Television Digital News Association, which bills itself as "the world's largest professional organization exclusively serving the electronic news profession," opened its annual conference in Las Vegas on April 12, it was with a panel of journalists from broadcast, radio and the Associated Press, focused not on the digital newsroom, but on the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12. According to the RTDNA website, the discussion that ensued was dominated by ethical questions.
At the National Cheng Chi University at Taiwan, Dart Center Country Contact Julia Hsu heads up a research team, consisting largely of students in her Department of Radio and Television, called Trauma News Watch. Besides monitoring traumatic news as the team's name suggests, they have been translating and adapting Dart Center materials for use in Taiwan.
The Dart Center has long distributed publications at little or no charge, providing in-depth resources on journalism and trauma to journalists, journalism educators, newsroom managers and others around the world. Among them are two videos:
Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with journalists in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico: countries where the media are under fire for the watchdog role they perform. I have been awed by their powerful commitment to the profession and to the public they serve despite great personal risk. I always departed wishing I could do more.
The 82nd annual Academy Awards are coming up on March 7, and one of the films in the running, nominated for six Oscars, is "Precious." It's the story of a 16-year-old African-American girl living in Harlem who suffers physical, sexual and emotional abuse and is pregnant by her own father. It's the first film directed by an African-American to ever be nominated for best picture. It's also the first film in a long time to bring the issue of child sexual abuse to the forefront of the Academy Awards ceremony and the American imagination.
No matter what the beat or medium, young journalists are almost certain to encounter human tragedy in the course of their work. But few student journalists are trained to recognize trauma and stress reactions in survivors, to make informed ethical choices about trauma news, or to deal with their own emotional reactions while on the job. With this in mind, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has established a new Academic Fellowship Program.