This note from MIPA Executive Director Jeremy Steele was shared to the MIPA adviser email listserv earlier today:
The news from Oxford High School yesterday shook many of us, and I’m sure is leading to tough conversations in classrooms around the country today. This latest mass shooting likely also may lead to coverage by many student media programs, both potentially of this tragedy and of the safety plans within your own school.
Both of these issues are appropriate topics for student journalists, when handled with sensitivity, care and respect.
While our society may often consider grief to be an emotion best handled in private, I can tell you from my own experience as a reporter that journalists can provide an important service to their community in helping people process their grief. Telling the stories of people lost to any tragedy – from the pandemic to natural disasters to accidents to crimes – is one of the more challenging parts of being a journalist, but can also be tremendously rewarding.
Journalists also have an essential role to play in the ongoing public discourse about how we can best protect youth from gun violence in our schools and communities.
There are many resources available to help guide journalists through the best practices of providing such coverage. These resources can help journalists feel more comfortable taking on such tough topics, and can help your staffs avoid problems we sometimes see in such news coverage. Like with news coverage of suicides, journalists need to take on coverage of mass shootings with special care.
Here are just a few resources that you might use with your newspaper, yearbook and broadcast students. If you have others, please feel free to share them with the listserv.
- Columbia Journalism Review: It’s time to rethink coverage of school shootings https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/parkland-anniversary-education-reporters.php
- Radio Television Digital News Association Guidelines: Mass Shootings https://www.rtdna.org/content/rtdna_guidelines_mass_shootings
- Poynter: Best practices for covering mass shootings https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2018/best-practices-for-covering-mass-shootings/
- Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma: Resources for Covering Mass Shootings (best practices for working with victims and survivors, and more) https://dartcenter.org/resources/resources-covering-mass-shootings
- Recommendations for Reporting on Mass Shootings, assembled by Suicide Awareness Voices of Education and other experts https://www.reportingonmassshootings.org/
- PBS NewsHour resources for students and teachers: How students feel about new school security measures since Parkland https://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily-videos/how-students-feel-about-new-school-security-measures-since-parkland/?fbclid=IwAR3t7pkMuwyIAAbjo2f6teGHZcQ8312G6YrzILUm_iT10ZPL2OuhyATv3R0?
Moments like this also serve as a reminder of the importance of developing a comprehensive staff manual and using it as a guide for your coverage. Many of our member programs have great staff manuals that can serve as a model for you and your student journalists to develop your own. Just like your schools have to do emergency planning, your media programs too should prepare as best you can before you have to deal with a tragedy. A policy on how to cover the death of a student or staff member at your school can be an important guide for your journalists to do their work sensitively and equitably should your community face that situation.
It’s also essential that advisers and student journalists practice self care when covering these kinds of tough topics. The notebook and the camera sometimes shield journalists from having to deal with the immediate emotional impact of a tragedy, but those emotions can and do eventually catch up to folks. There are a variety of resources that have been circulated in the past 24 hours about discussing gun violence and tragedies with children and students, and where to seek outside support. All of these resources certainly apply to student journalists, and I encourage you and your students to use them.
If there’s any way MIPA can help you and your students, please don’t hesitate to reach out.