Resources for covering sexual assault, Blog Posts

Freelance journalists and photographers from all corners of Ukraine came together for a five-day workshop in Kiev.

Sara Cardine of The (Stockton, Calif.) Record reports on a PTSD treatment group for female veterans.

Over the years, I have had the good fortune to work with journalists in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico: countries where the media are under fire for the watchdog role they perform.  I have been awed by their powerful commitment to the profession and to the public they serve despite great personal risk.  I always departed wishing I could do more.

At the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum last month, Dart Centre Europe led a workshop on covering refugees, featuring journalists Mani Benchelah and Alex Hannaford, psychiatrist Dr. Iris Graf-Calliess and Save the Children’s Misty Buswell.

The results are in from the only controlled study to date on the effects of trauma on journalists covering the conflict in Syria, which has claimed the lives of 63 reporters and media workers since 2011.

"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.

For journalists sorting fact from myth as they cover the story of 2009 H1N1, there's now a one-stop resource for you online.  "Covering Pandemic Flu" provides resources written by journalists for journalists ... 

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, reporting on combat veterans remains a special challenge. Earlier this year the Dart Center, with support from the Thomas Scattergood Foundation for Behavioral Health,  sponsored a two-day workshop on covering veterans' issues for local journalists and regional news organizations in the greater Philadelphia area. Now available online: tipsheets and audio of experts and journalists on veterans' issues, navigating the VA and innovative approaches to covering vets at the local and regional level.

Earlier in October, Dart Center Executive Director Bruce Shapiro led a panel discussion at Columbia Journalism School on covering violence and tragedy, part of the school's All-Class Lecture series for graduate journalism students. The panel featured Marianne McCune, a reporter for WNYC and a Columbia j-school alum; and Rob Perez, 2009 Dart Award winner and reporter for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Thomson Reuters will cover the costs for up to fourteen freelance journalists to attend a five-day Hostile Environment Training course run in Belfast, Northern Ireland.