When I moved from Poynter’s editorial team to the teaching team, I knew two things for sure: I wanted to keep this newsletter, and I did not want to use it as an infomercial for Poynter’s training … unless that training was free and relevant to local journalists.

Last week, I shared our Beat Academy on immigration, and this week, I have two more free things to share. They all feel pretty important at this moment. 

On Monday, we launched The Mental Health Reporting Project. This training, which we built with The Carter Center, includes five lessons to sharpen your reporting skills around mental health. And every beat includes mental health. Led by my colleague, Kerwin Speight, it features the work of five journalists who cover mental health — Esmy Jimenez, Ashley Hopkinson, Mary Hall, Anissa Durham and Taylor Blatchford. 

The asynchronous course is free thanks to support from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. It contains five lessons, which you can take in any order you want. They include getting started, using tools to cover the beat responsibly, the role of race and equity in mental health, covering suicide and addiction and how to practice trauma-informed reporting. Each lesson also includes a section on how to take care of yourself.

There’s more coming, including reporting from our experts and free webinars. You can find the course here. 

The other free training we’re offering takes place virtually at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, April 7. Safeguarding Your Journalism Against Legal Threats, an OnPoynt webinar, features David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel at The New York Times and Victoria Baranetsky, general counsel at the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as my colleagues, Kelly McBride and Sitara Nieves. 

Nieves wrote about the webinar and a few of the questions organizers have heard so far:

• What can we do to protect our work and our team against lawsuits?
• Do we need to think differently about how we deal with documents, given the current environment? Do we need new policies on document retention? 
• Do we need to think about getting a lawyer on retainer?
• Do we need different layers of tech security to make sure our sources are protected?
• How should we think differently about the risks of discovery as we work with vulnerable sources?

“These legal concerns strike at the heart of our ability as journalists to seek out the truth and share that truth with audiences that depend on us,” McBride told Nieves. “When we understand our risks and prepare for them, we are more likely to stay strong.” 

You can sign up here. 

That’s it for me, I hope these resources help make your work and our country better.

Kristen