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Meg Spratt, right, of Dart Center West attends the Teaching Border Reporting Initiative workshop in October 2011.
Dart West receives border-reporting grant
January 13, 2011
Journalists who report along the U.S.-Mexico border can be confronted with dangerous situations — turf wars among drug cartels, mass homicides and kidnappings among them — and it is necessary that they have the skills to write their stories while staying out of the line of fire.
Dart Center West, a satellite office of The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma based at Columbia University in New York, was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Gannett Foundation to provide the support for student journalists and educators interested in reporting on U.S.-Mexico border issues.
The award will help Dart Center West continue the Teaching Border Reporting Initiative. The grant will fund a second conference in 2011, and support web-based curriculum projects related to covering risky communities along the border. “The Gannett Foundation grant is a great acknowledgment of the good work already done by journalism educators in the Southwest, and the value of an ongoing Dart Center project on teaching trauma journalism as it relates to border reporting,” said Meg Spratt, Associate Director of Academic Programs for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
The Dart Center is a global network of journalists, journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to improving media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy. The Center's office at the University of Washington directs academic programs and West Coast activities.
With these goals in mind, faculty from the University of Arizona approached the Dart Center last October with the idea that journalism schools in border regions are facing issues about keeping students physically and emotionally safe while producing quality journalism, Spratt said.
To provide the attention necessary for these issues, journalism educators from 10 universities and five states assembled at the University of Arizona in Tucson for the first Teaching Border Reporting Initiative workshop. Brittany Birkett, a UW Communication major, attended the workshop as a student assistant where faculty discussed the challenges involved with teaching border reporting along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The group was buzzing with potential teaching techniques, ideas for keeping students safe and suggestions for future meetings,” she wrote in her article on the event.
After such a successful conference, a concrete plan for the future was developed, and a proposal was sent to the Gannett Foundation Media Grant program. “Much of the credit for this grant should go to the group of educators that met for the workshop in Tucson,” said Spratt. “This is a group of motivated and caring teachers, and the grant proposal was based on their ideas and collaborative efforts.”
