Resources for How Trauma Affects Photographers, Blog Posts

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.

At the 2017 Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany, Dart Centre Europe's Gavin Rees joined photographers Capucine Granier-Deferre and Patrick Tombola to discuss coping with trauma while reporting from conflict zones.

For reporters covering the horrifying shooting spree at an Aurora, Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises, the Dart Center has an array of tipsheets and other resources.

More than 20 journalists gathered July 30 in Harrisburg, Pa. for a trauma journalism seminar put on by the Pennsylvania Newsmedia Association.

At the tenth International Journalism Festival in Perugia, a panel of experts gathered to discuss the effects of vicarious trauma among news professionals, and possible solutions to graphic image overload.

During my career, I have interviewed dozens of people whose lives have been shattered by trauma. Each time, I agonized over the effect my reporting had on their suffering.

Did my journalistic mission justify probing into their private pain? Did I push too hard for details? Was I properly respectful and empathetic? Did anything positive come of it for them?

Washington Post reporter Donna St. George tells the story of Trinette Johnson, an Iraq War veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

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.

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.

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: