Five years after a gunman opened fire on a classroom of 120 at Northern Illinois University, killing five, former student journalists reflected on their experiences covering the tragedy in an article for the Rockford Register Star.
A documentary project follows the homicide epidemic in Chicago, where last year, 243 people under the age of 25 were killed. The city now leads the nation in homicides.
Following last month’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, WSHU Public Radio News Director Naomi Starobin shares lessons learned from her newsroom in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Dart Center staff and affiliates were in the news, speaking about best practices for journalists covering tragedy involving children, and how to move forward.
Following Friday's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Dart Center's executive director Bruce Shapiro has been asked by multiple news outlets to discuss the ethics of interviewing children in the midst of tragedy.
The 82nd annual Academy Awards are coming up on March 7, and one of the films in the running, nominated for six Oscars, is "Precious." It's the story of a 16-year-old African-American girl living in Harlem who suffers physical, sexual and emotional abuse and is pregnant by her own father. It's the first film directed by an African-American to ever be nominated for best picture. It's also the first film in a long time to bring the issue of child sexual abuse to the forefront of the Academy Awards ceremony and the American imagination.
Dark, cold, grey, brooding Helsinki. This was the backdrop for Violence in the Networked Society, an international conference hosted by University of Helsinki’s Communication Research Center on Nov. 6 and 7, 2009. It was a particularly poignant setting, because in 2007 and again in 2008 Finland was the site of school shootings that together left 18 students murdered. In this highly literate and socially conscious society, the sense of communal grief was profound — a national trauma.
"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.
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.
Yesterday, for the 10th anniversary of the most infamous school shooting, the Dart Center published a package for student journalists and educators on covering similar incidents; today, we took a look around the web and through our archive for more.