Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

A sprawling investigation of domestic violence and criminal justice; a first-person narrative trying to understand the writer's rapist; a carefully orchestrated radio series on brutal sexual assault as a weapon of war. The stories honored yesterday as winners of the 2009 Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma appear at first glance to share little in the way of practical approach. More »

If there is one constant in the political history of Gaza over the 61 years since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, it is that whenever it is thought that the situation can’t get any worse, it usually does. The Israeli-Hamas war that ended three months ago left many hundreds dead, thousands of others robbed of their livlihoods and the political divisions within Palestinian society just as deeply fissured as before. More »

Three decades after the end of the deadly Khmer Rouge regime, the first of Cambodia's genocide trials has finally begun. More »

Yesterday, for the 10th anniversary of the most infamous school shooting, the Dart Center published a package for student journalists and educators on covering similar incidents; today, we took a look around the web and through our archive for more. More »

When should news stories label interrogation practices torture?

That question arises from the Obama administration’s release of Bush administration legal memos endorsing - and precisely describing – the brutal abuse of "high-value" detainees. Never before has a president taken such an initiative in releasing basic documents about human rights abuses by the executive branch. More »

On the latest edition of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Correspondents Report," host Elizabeth Jackson asks senior journalist (and Ochberg Fellow) Lisa Millar and foreign affairs editor Peter Cave about their most fearful reporting experiences. But the stories that they tell of threatening soldiers and beheaded suicide bombers aren't necessarily the ones that most moved them. More »

Old friends of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma have probably noticed an important change:  a new university affiliation.  The Dart Center is now a project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. More »

From a Denny's restaurant in Omaha comes a tale of cross-border drug smuggling, cross-media journalistic cooperation — and the long-awaited arrest of the alleged killer of a Mexican journalist.

The 2004 murder of Gregory Rodriguez, a photojournalist for the Sinaloa newspaper, El Debate, was an early harbinger of the wave of assassinations that have made Mexico the most dangerous country on earth for reporters outside of Iraq.  But now an alleged Mexican drug smuggler arrested in that Omaha Denny's has been implicated in Rodriguez's murder, report Dart Center Ochberg Fellows Karyn Spencer (2008) and Michel Marizco (2007). More »

At the end of a long week focused on launching our own website, the Dart Blog is checking out the rest of the Internet. Here are a few of the places we're clicking ... More »

Welcome to the new online home of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma!

Over the last 18 months, we've redesigned, rebuilt, and reconceived DartCenter.org as a state-of-the-art resource center, think tank and platform for coverage of violence, conflict and tragedy the world over.

This makeover of DartCenter.org comes with journalism itself in upheaval. Journalists who cover street crime and courts, family violence, war, disasters or human rights now are squeezed between the 24 hour news cycle and an industry in economic crisis ... More »