Hi and happy December! This week, I’m turning the newsletter over to my colleagues, Barbara Allen and Kelly McBride, for a short look at a transformative Poynter program on covering crime.
Barbara, take it away!
Poynter’s Kelly McBride has a tough fact to share with you: For decades, newsrooms have been an unwitting public relations arm for law enforcement.
And she admits she was once part of the problem.
“I was a police reporter for years. I covered the gamut, from small-town to metropolitan center,” McBride said. “And that’s how I know firsthand how tough it can be to change the way we do business.”
McBride is co-lead instructor of Transforming Local Crime Reporting Into Public Safety Journalism, a project designed to help newsrooms improve their promotion of public safety and community awareness.
She said that journalists can be disingenuous about why we cover crime.
“We tell ourselves that we cover it so that the public can keep itself safe, but the old system of cops reporting creates sensational crime scoops that don’t really help people understand the issues and trends that impact public safety,” she said.
In Transforming Crime, she said, newsroom teams will learn some more tough facts:
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They should move away from an "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality and instead prioritize public safety and community impact as coverage goals.
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They should focus on explanatory and accountability reporting and include perspectives from those communities most affected by crime.
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And finally, newsrooms should use data to understand and communicate trends, develop clear guidelines for which crimes actually deserve coverage, and learn to create formal policies and training programs to improve their reporting.
Applications for the next course are due Dec. 6 for the early bird price of $600 per newsroom team. The final deadline is Jan. 17 at $1,000 per team.
“In a world of limited resources, we often chose to do the stories that are easy and accessible, rather than the stories that are actually helpful to our audiences,” McBride said. “If we’re going to say that journalism is a critical part of democracy, we have to choose to spend our resources on stories that we think will help our audience participate in democracy — not just be interesting or sensational.”
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