An October report from the American Psychological Association found that, for 52 percent of adults, the presidential election is a source of stress. Poynter's Kristen Hare spoke with Dart's Bruce Shapiro and Rebecca Palpant from the Carter Center on staying sane and safe while covering the final weeks of the election.
Arnold R. Isaacs, a war correspondent in Vietnam and author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia and Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy, outlines misconceptions about journalists in Vietnam.
The Dart Center is offering a four-day reporting institute for international journalists on early childhood experience and the developing brain, March 9-12, 2017 at Columbia Journalism School in New York City. The application deadline has passed.
A new series in the Lancet, Advancing Early Childhood Development: from Science to Scale, makes some troubling predictions. In middle and low-income countries, almost 250 million children – 43 percent of children under five – will fail to meet their developmental potential because of extreme poverty and deprivation. Karen Brown reports on these new findings in advance of the Dart Center's four-day reporting institute on early childhood experience and the developing brain.
The Dart Center offered a two-day reporting institute on covering gun violence for journalists reporting in the Midwest, February 10 and 11 in Chicago, Illinois. A select number of institute participants will be awarded three to six month reporting fellowships for 2017.
In the summer of 2016, in advance of a two-day conference commemorating the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize, Dart Center researchers interviewed 10 Pulitzer Prize winners from the past 20 years who were honored for their coverage of traumatic events or investigative reporting on trauma-related issues. Navigate through sections of this article to find pieces by: Alex Hannaford, who wrote on the relationship between Pulitzer winners and their sources, and on the impact of Charles Porter's 1996 Prize-winning photo; Elana Newman, who gathered advice from honorees on best practices in trauma reporting, and created teaching notes for the classroom with Matthew Ricketson and Autumn Slaughter; Matthew Ricketson, who also wrote a conference recap for those who could not be in attendance.
Journalists Alex Renton, Katharine Quarmby and Olly Lambert spoke with the Dart Center about the challenges of reporting on child abuse, and trauma experts Sarah Heke and Shelagh Beckett shared tactics for interviewing victims of childhood trauma.
Anniversaries mark progress and the passage of time. They can also conjure memories we may not always want to face. On this anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Dart Center calls attention to a uniquely eloquent journalistic record of the attacks' long aftermath; to a powerful tenth anniversary essay on personal loss and collective historical memory; and to resources available as we seek to better cover, and understand, the longterm effects of horrific events.
At the 2016 Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference in New Orleans, the Dart Center sponsored a panel on investigating the aftermath of disasters featuring Jason Berry, Propublica's Justin Elliott, NPR's Laura Sullivan, PBS Frontline's Rick Young and the Dart Center's Bruce Shapiro.
In her book The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts, Laura Tillman examines the lasting effects of a deeply troubling crime—the brutal murder of three young children by their parents in the border city of Brownsville, Texas. Over six years, Tillman surveyed those surrounding the crimes, speaking with the lawyers who tried the case, the family’s neighbors, relatives and teachers, as well as one of the murderers: John Allen Rubio, whom she corresponded with for years. Over the course of their correspondence, Tillman wrestled with a series of tough questions: In the pursuit of a story, what constitutes manipulation? Is some degree of manipulation in this context inevitable? Is it wrong for a murderer to be gratified by the result?