It’s exciting to talk about going to jail to protect a source. But it’s much more practical to talk about how you can keep yourself out of court entirely.
"One of the first lessons we learned was the need for patience with survivors. We were often asking people to relive their trauma when we interviewed them and that carried a high emotional cost for families."
How a reporting team overcame countless hurdles to tell a new story of how children are affected by the family violence they experience, from the time they are in utero through childhood and after.
Journalists should strive for absolute clarity in language choice. Avoid ambigious phrases such as, “Dead but on life support.”
“When you're dealing with people who are not used to dealing with the media, we have a responsibility to protect them from themselves,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's James Causey said.
When reporter Arielle Levin Becker set out to interview families involved in a home-visiting program, she found unexpectedly difficult. The reservations voiced by potential sources ultimately led her to rethink how she approaches interviews in general.
Smart reporting on mental health makes an effort to avoid stigmatizing people with mental illness. Here are a few solutions one reporter found especially helpful in covering the subject in Texas, where the state's largest jail became its largest mental health facility.
If anything, the FCC proposal may not go far enough.
When is a story important enough to warrant reporting on a cause of death? Do the deaths of famous people open an opportunity to raise public awareness about medical errors or other health threats? What about the person next door?
