Dear friends of the Dart Center:
We’ve all been horrified and shaken by the massacre of children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut last week. We've all felt touched personally. Many of you have responded to the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, either professionally as journalists or with activism as citizens.
I have always viewed the Dart Center’s work as a direct reply to the kind of violence which devastated a quiet Connecticut town this week. Newtown shows why informed, ethical and trauma-aware journalism matters.
So at the Dart Center, my colleagues mobilized a robust and wide-ranging response to this exceptional event as soon as news of the shootings emerged a week ago.
- Within a few hours the Center’s web team posted a compilation of resources on covering children, mass shootings and community tragedy which have been widely shared both through social media and more traditional channels.
- Over recent days we have continued to enrich the site, adding new content and surfacing existing material relevant in the shootings' aftermath, such as a videotaped Dart Center workshop on investigating guns. We've been pleased to see our guidebook Covering Children and Trauma by Ochberg Fellow Ruth Teichroeb widely cited.
- The Center’s research team, headed by Professor Elana Newman at the University of Tulsa, put together new fact sheets, reporters' tips and science summaries on interviewing children and related issues, which we made available to journalists covering Newtown.
- Our ongoing partnerships with National Child Traumatic Stress Network and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies helped to connect journalists to the most authoritative expert sources. Through our relationship with Yale University’s Newtown community crisis team, we arranged for a senior clinician to be available for any journalist on-site in need of confidential support.
Over the last week the Dart Center has been actively sought out by many media outlets worldwide, both to weigh in on issues of ethical coverage and for behind-the-scenes guidance for news teams covering this difficult story. We’ve been featured widely in interviews and news reports, by among others: Connecticut Public Radio (an hour-long interview touching many Dart Center themes), multiple BBC programs, Politico, Huffington Post Live and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation .
So many journalists associated with the Dart Center have led the way with their own exemplary and compassionate coverage, and by encouraging colleagues to seek out Dart Center resources and attend to self-care on this difficult story. Among them:
- 2007 Dart Award winner Matthew Kauffman is part of the Hartford Courant team reporting full-time on Sandy Hook since last Friday morning;
- 2011 Ochberg Fellow Russell Lewis, Southern Bureau Chief of NPR, was deployed to Newtown to lead his network’s breaking news coverage;
- 2010 Dart Asia Pacific retreat veteran Jane Cowan has been on-scene in Newtown for the ABC;
- 1999 Ochberg Fellow David Handschuh has been photographing the shootings’ aftermath for the New York Daily News;
- 2012 Fellow Stuart Hughes, senior reporter for the BBC, drew extensively on Dart Center resources for his post-Newtown column on covering children for the BBC College of Journalism and in his on-air BBC dispatches, including an interview with Frank Ochberg;
- The ABC’s Sally Sara, another Ochberg 2012 Fellow, interviewed me about the Newtown tragedy and the role of journalists;
- 2003 Fellow Dave Cullen was interviewed on CBS This Morning about lessons learned while reporting on Columbine.
The Sandy Hook shootings will continue to challenge journalists in Connecticut and worldwide. At the Dart Center we'll continue to create new resources, adapt our existing materials and provide behind-the-scenes support to journalists as the situation warrants.
With this year closing on such a challenging note, I am especially grateful for your interest, encouragement and support over the last 12 months.
If you are able to make a year-end financial contribution to support the Center’s work, you will help strengthen the capacity of journalists, news organizations and news consumers worldwide to respond to violence, conflict and tragedy.
On behalf of all of us on the Dart Center team, best wishes for peaceful holidays.
Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director