One of the many virtues of the new online Reuters Handbook of Journalism: It is the first generally-available newsroom style guide with specific guidelines for reporting on victims of trauma.
On the morning of Friday, July 17, at least eight people were killed and fifty injured in near-simultaneous bombings of two luxury hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia. It was the first major terrorist attack to take place on Indonesian soil in several years.
To help journalists covering this story, in Indonesia and around the world, the Dart Center is aggregating useful resources. If you have an addition, please add it in the comments.
"If I asked you to fill in the following statement, 'Journalists are __,' what's the first thing that pops into your head?" Elana Newman, research director of the Dart Center, posed this question Monday as part of a webinar she co-hosted with Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro. In a disaster, when interviewing and reporting on victims is inevitable, the gap between a clinician's answer and a journalist's answer to this question can be the difference between stories that are both sensitive and effective and stories that are neither.
This week, the Nieman Foundation's Narrative Digest published interviews with St. Petersburg Times reporters Ben Montgomery and Waveny Ann Moore about their co-authored April story on the effects of a century of abuse at the Florida School for Boys.
Meanwhile, journalism by the masses continued to change coverage of mass events
Does this mean I have to watch it again?
That was my first thought when asked for my reaction to “the Neda video.”
I had watched it early on, before its provenance was clear, and felt I had already grappled with its horror. I remember forcing myself to face the screen, as if watching every second would admit me to some global community of the grieving.
Last month in Bonn, Germany, news media, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs and scientists from all over the world came together to discuss conflict in a multimedia age. The Dart Center organized panels on "The Trauma Factor: The Missing Ingredient in Conflict Journalism" and "Surviving Kidnap": You now can download or listen online to the audio.
In Baghdad, Chancellor Keesling, a 25-year-old soldier from Indianapolis, shot and killed himself. In Tehran, Neda Agha Soltan, a 26-year-old student, was shot and killed as she watched a peaceful protest.
Two very different deaths, two very different news stories, but both required context to express or arouse anything but pain and loss.
Here at the Dart Center we focus on coverage of violence and its aftermath. Usually that means better understanding the role of emotional injury in the lives of individuals or communities.
But sometimes the story is exactly the opposite: What happens when individuals and communities, whose lives have been thwarted and voices diminished by trauma and fear, find creative ways to assert their rights and aspirations?
"Why am I doing this? Because I think it's incredibly important for you and for the audience to hear this story." Documentary photographer Mimi Chakarova said this of the risks and challenges entailed by her latest project on Iraqi rape victims. But the same could have been said by either of her fellow panelists as they talked about "Covering Invisible Populations" at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference on Saturday.
I just came out of my first session at the 2009 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference: a discussion of new frontiers and strategies in mapping. For the next few days, I along with many others from the Dart network will be attending panels and talking to some of the world's best investigative reporters, editors, producers and news directors.