In the southern Philippines, the death toll from Typhoon Bopha has exceeded 1,000 as rescue workers continue to search for hundreds of missing. Dart Center resources for journalists are available.
At the Dart Center we were fortunate to be spared the worst of Sandy. Columbia University never lost power, and storm damage in Morningside Heights was minimal. But many of our neighbors in the region remain in crisis. For anyone who wants to help, Columbia has assembled a continually-updated list of organizations providing aid.
“This is the first time I’ve ever done an entire program on one single topic like this,” said Radio New Zealand’s Colin Peacock.
As I am sure you know, the death toll continues to rise in Joplin, Missouri, devastated by the worst tornado to hit the U.S. in 60 years. At this writing, 132 people are dead, and many others are still missing.
On the fifth anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, DartCenter.org highlights content from our website that is relevant to journalists.
Mata’afa Kene Lesa woke up in heaven Sept. 19 and found himself in hell. When a tsunami struck Upolu, one of Western Samoa’s two main islands, Lesa – the editor of Samoa Observer – was one of the first local journalists to respond, racing to the affected area to be met by scenes of death and devastation.
What has become known as the "Black Saturday Bushfires" is Australia’s worse natural disaster to date. On Feb. 7, 2009, temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius and winds of 100 km per hour created explosive firestorms with 1500 times the energy of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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.
One year ago, a massive earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale killed tens of thousands and displaced millions in the Sichuan province of China. In the immediate aftermath, the Chinese government permitted journalists unprecedented access to the devastation. Stories of collapsed schools and miraculous survival brought the world closer to the rural villages of China, but the work took its toll on the storytellers.