‘Trauma makes its way back to you’: Four US journalists on covering mass shootings
In the photograph published in The Washington Post, a woman kneels on the ground, her hands in her lap, her body bathed in red neon light. She is mourning outside of the Aromatherapy Spa in Atlanta, Georgia, one scene of a mass shooting in March 2021 that killed eight people. Behind every photograph and news report of a…
CPJ Safety Advisory: The Mosul offensive and psychological injury
The military campaign to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State (IS) group, known as the Mosul offensive, has resumed with Iraqi forces engaged in a second phase attempting to take further neighborhoods in eastern parts of the city. A number of journalists, freelancers and staffers, remain in Northern Iraq and travel…
Stressed out: How should newsrooms handle trauma?
The rampage inside a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 people and injured dozens more is the most recent reminder that a journalist anywhere can face sudden, great emotional stress. Any story involving tragedy–from domestic violence to natural disasters–can inflict an emotional toll on field journalists. The very empathy that makes a journalist a good…