Resources for Blog Posts

Two weeks ago, we blogged about what newspapers were calling a "controlled landing" and TV networks were calling a "plane crash" in the Hudson River. Today, Maria Alvarez, a 2002 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow who covered the 9/11 attacks and aftermath for the New York Post, writes about her experience reporting on Flight 1549, and how it brought back memories of a very different day when a plane appeared in New York City's skies.

We just got word of an upcoming Northern Short Course in Photojournalism from the National Press Photographers Association, including a program geared specifically at photojournalism educators: "From Newsroom to Classroom."

Of particular note is the workshop "Talking About Trauma to our Students," run by Dart Center Ochberg Fellows Jim MacMillan and Mike Walter. They'll be covering topics including...

A journalist in Sri Lanka writes that if Westerners saw a newspaper editor's murder as a symbol of press freedom, Sri Lankans saw him as "no less than a fallen warrior."

An American student in Syria writes an essay on how, politics aside, Al Jazeera's graphic Gaza coverage is a stinging rebuke to the "bloodless war journalism" in the United States.

And the Frontline Club's blog carries the trailer for Burma VJ, a documentary on Burmese reporters who risked their lives covering the failed revolution in September 2007.

A Sri Lankan newspaper editor's murder was followed by a powerful posthumous editorial in which he defended his criticism of the government even as he predicted it would lead to his death: "There is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience."

Newspapers report a plane's "controlled landing" near New York City, while TV networks call it a "plane crash." The first pictures of the event were taken and posted to the Internet by passengers, begging the question of how microblogging program Twitter is redefining spot news.

Welcome to 2009. The Dart Center is back online for a busy couple of months; We'll keep you updated on our activities here. In the meantime, here are some items you may have missed over the holiday season.

Times-Picayune photographer John McCusker's haunting multimedia retrospective on the "ghosts of Katrina."

Denver Post reporter (and 2004 Ochberg Fellow) Miles Moffeit's feature following the first year of freedom for Tim Masters, the first Colorado murder convict freed by DNA evidence.

Now online are several powerful stories PBS has been airing on the Democratic Republic of Congo, putting a human face on statistics impossible to fathom: a decade of civil war that has killed some five million people, left two hundred thousand women raped, and displaced a quarter of a million Congolese in the last three months alone.

The first story is Pascal Bumbari's. A 25-year-old father of two, Bumbari and his family were displaced twice within a year, his wife Vestine giving birth on their tent's mud floor in a makeshift camp housing over 20,000 other displaced people. After the story aired, they were forced to flee again, and Pascal's family can't be located.

In next month's Men's Journal, Greg Veis profiles Chris Ware: CNN correspondent, six years into Iraq. Ware shows Veis harrowing video of a raid, and argues for the importance of getting footage that puts viewers close to the awful action of combat.

"I can no longer go down that lonely farm road. I still see the bloodied, headless body of the motor cyclist jump out at me from behind the tree that killed him. I was first on the scene before the ambulance or police. I didn't know what else to do other than take in the details for my local paper. I continued to have nightmares for a long, long time about this."

Six journalism grad students working with ABC’s 20/20 spent the summer investigating the stories of soldiers who abuse drugs. In their TV report, soldiers speak to the students of going into war drug-free, but turning to cocaine, amphetamines, and prescription drugs to deal with their traumatic experiences.

"Let's hold hands to show we are united." Though the image above was taken by photojournalist Donna DeCesare, the idea behind it came from this spontaneous thought from one of the image's "protagonists" (a term DeCesare prefers to "subject"). Nancy and her six younger siblings were displaced by three days of torture and killings by paramilitaries that left more than 40 villagers dead in El Salado, Colombia in the year 2000. Though it would be dangerous for them to reveal their faces or full names, through DeCesare's unique collaborative approach, they were able to choose, creatively and expressively, how they would be seen.