Covering Youth Violence, a guide for journalists—Informes sobre la violencia juvenil
This is a guide for your coverage of youth violence. It will walk you through reporting strategies, offer examples of reporting, and ask you to consider how you can do your best for an issue that touches so many lives today. Why do we need a guide? Because the work you do, shapes [...]
Explaining why guns are dynamite in Chicago
Sometimes the reporting on guns and crime in Chicago forgets the basic facts, and forgets too how to explain them. Here’s an excellent piece by Jim Warren who has moved to the New York Daily news. Steve@chicagoistheworld.org BY JAMES WARREN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2013, WASHINGTON — When it comes to [...]
It’s More Than Guns, Mr. President
Welcome home Mr. President. Your trip home to talk about guns and jobs and the economy is uplifting. Guns matter. Guns took many of the more than 500 lives lost here last year. We had over 2,200 shootings last year, up near 20 percent in one year. So, nobody will tell you that guns are [...]
How Do We Bring Calm to Troubled Places?
From Thom Clark “From Pageantry to Tragedy” the Chicago Sun-Times cover headlined screamed out last Wednesday morning. As reported all over, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot in the back while waiting after school for the pouring rain to stop in a neighborhood park less than a mile from President Barack Obama’s home, only a week [...]
Covering youth violence – Sources
Covering Youth Violence: Telling the Whole Story, Community-Linked Mental Health Services Program, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago The Community Linked Mental Health Services Program (CLMHSP) of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago works in conjunction with schools and other community partners in the Chicago area to develop and [...]
Covering up gaps that mend, a story that goes beyond
here’s a story from colleague Curtis Black… What links this event to others, I think, is the sense of loss over the reduction in social work and other services that make a difference for students. Public vigils remind us that neighbors care deeply about violence. But the roots of their concern should also point us [...]
This Stain Does Not Wash Away
After the family tells their story. After the funeral and more stories. After the blood is washed away, or the room of the victim is cleaned up, what about the family? Does anyone help them through the time ahead? All too often there’s no help, no counseling, no sharing of advice and support. That’s the [...]
What Numbers Matter? Not Just Homicide
Numbers drive us, but sometimes they aren’t the right numbers. Thirty years ago I was trying to understand violence in Detroit. I was a reporter with the Detroit Free Press. All we had then from the FBI were total crimes for each city. That didn’t tell us how the cities compared. So, I called and [...]
Telling the whole story about violence
The numbers are not on our side. Murders are up. Shootings are markedly up. But more care about what’s happening, and more put their energy and expertise into making a difference. And that’s the story we hope we’ll make available at our Jan. 29th gathering besides the heartbreaking one about what’s happening on some Chicago [...]
There’s more to this story
We were talking about reading about someone killed in a gang murder and how sometimes this doesn’t seem possible. How it seems that too many killings are reported as gang killings. And that made me think of an article that tracked a number of killings some time after to see what was the cause and [...]
Trails that go nowhere and trails that take us places
We face two paths most of the time in dealing in youth violence. In one direction, we slam it. We arrest, detain, shut down, curtail the wave. That’s the police and court solution. In the other direction, we look at the forces below the volcano and try to deal with them before they erupt. Folks [...]
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