Resources for Blog Posts

From a Denny's restaurant in Omaha comes a tale of cross-border drug smuggling, cross-media journalistic cooperation — and the long-awaited arrest of the alleged killer of a Mexican journalist.

The 2004 murder of Gregory Rodriguez, a photojournalist for the Sinaloa newspaper, El Debate, was an early harbinger of the wave of assassinations that have made Mexico the most dangerous country on earth for reporters outside of Iraq.  But now an alleged Mexican drug smuggler arrested in that Omaha Denny's has been implicated in Rodriguez's murder, report Dart Center Ochberg Fellows Karyn Spencer (2008) and Michel Marizco (2007).

At the end of a long week focused on launching our own website, the Dart Blog is checking out the rest of the Internet. Here are a few of the places we're clicking ...

Welcome to the new online home of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma!

Over the last 18 months, we've redesigned, rebuilt, and reconceived DartCenter.org as a state-of-the-art resource center, think tank and platform for coverage of violence, conflict and tragedy the world over.

This makeover of DartCenter.org comes with journalism itself in upheaval. Journalists who cover street crime and courts, family violence, war, disasters or human rights now are squeezed between the 24 hour news cycle and an industry in economic crisis ...

Even if you're not new to DartCenter.org, this DartCenter.org is new to you. The best way to explore the new is to dig in and browse. But for those who prefer a map, here are some of the highlights:

Gateways: Beneath our iconic logo (your link back to the homepage) you'll find "gateway" links that follow you around the site: click these for instant access to  resources of specific interest to either journalists, educators, researchers and scholars, or clinicians ...

Today is the second day of a conference the Dart Center is co-hosting (along with the Open Society Institute and the Fund for Independence in Journalism) at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism: Enlarging the Spaces for Investigative Journalism: Countering Threats, Supporting Innovations You can watch the panels online at BlogTalkRadio, and read background materials, briefings from the panelists and almost-live blogging coverage of the panels themselves the official conference website.

Turn on C-SPAN2 tonight at 7 p.m. (EST) and watch 2005 Ochberg Fellow Mike Walter's documentary "Breaking News, Breaking Down."

The film grew out of a 2007 Dart Society project called Target: New Orleans that sent reporters to the Gulf Coast to lend a hand in post-Katrina reconstruction. The film interweaves this trip with reporters speaking candidly about the hardest stories they've covered and how, as Walter says, "breaking news can break you down."

If you don't have C-SPAN2 on TV, don't worry; you can watch the live stream online.

This year's Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting went to Karyn Spencer, a 2008 Ochberg Fellow, for her work on a two-week series in the Omaha World-Herald, exposing Nebraska's bungled coroner system. Rocky Mountain News has the announcement here.

On today's edition of BBC's Media Show, host Ed Stourton, ABC reporter Richelle Hunt, Global Editor for Multimedia at Reuters Chris Cramer and International Editor of Channel 4 News Lindsey Hilsum discuss how journalists can best be supported when covering traumatic events.

The bushfires that raged through Australia this weekend were the deadliest in the nation's history, tearing through towns and leading the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Victorian Premier John Brumby to describe the situation as "hell on Earth." At the time of this story's publishing, the death toll was 126, including respected news anchor Brian Naylor ...

If you haven't heard of GlobalPost--an ambitious new international news start-up-- read this Columbia Journalism Review profile now. Whether or not their innovative business and editorial model is the Future of Journalism, it's cheering to read on their founding editor Charles M. Sennott's blog that they will be distributing the Dart Center's guide to covering violence--Tragedies and Journalists--to all their correspondents.

We emailed Sennott to ask how he became involved with the Dart Center and how else his organization planned to help his semi-freelance reporters cover traumatic events.