The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/resources/for-journalists/page/2/)
Fifteen years after reported crime in the United States reached a modern day peak, many news reporters, along with their sources, are groping to understand the decline. With a few notable exceptions, media coverage of the trends in 2009 primarily was a story of crime dropping in many big cities.
A crime reporting case study of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May-November 2012.
Police-media relations may have bottomed out following a series a controversial police-involved deaths beginning last August, when Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. Journalists covering the resulting unrest were harassed, bullied and arrested by police.
How well is the media covering today’s complex criminal justice issues? Four leading commentators weigh in.
Data reporting has transformed criminal justice journalism. It’s also contributed to the emergence of an information-sharing ethos on a beat usually seen as hyper-competitive.
The Crime Report’s Washington Bureau Chief Ted Gest and Deb Wenger, associate professor at the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, appeared on DC Public Safety Radio to discuss their content analysis of crime coverage in six U.S. newspapers.
Although newspapers have been struggling to maintain reporting muscle, crime and criminal justice content continues to be a staple of local coverage, according to a study commissioned by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice (CMCJ) at John Jay College.
The evolution of breaking news coverage stood out like an appositional thumb during the turmoil in Ferguson, Mo.
Breaking-news journalism, linked inextricably to criminal justice beats, is changing—driven by unrelenting micro-deadlines and financial pressures that have whittled staffs and forced editors and producers to rethink their newsroom structures and news-gathering processes.
We’re only two months into 2011, and there’s no shortage of crime news —-from the shooting of a congresswoman in Tucson that shocked the nation to a supposedly “polite” armed robber in Seattle who also got wide notice. Yet few stories on individual crimes, large and small, enlighten Americans much on how to reduce crime generally or to protect themselves specifically.