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.
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.
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.
A team of five reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer has been documenting serious problems in Philadelphia’s court system for more than two years for a groundbreaking series which found that the city had the highest violent crime rate among America’s 10 largest cities and among the lowest conviction rates for big cities.
investigative reporters Doug Pardue and Glenn Smith of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina looked at why their state seemed to have so many cases of violent crimes being committed by people who had been paroled or placed on probation.
Crime Reporting Case Study: Mistaken Identities A project of the Center on Media, Crime & Justice and Criminal Justice Journalists Debora Halpern Wenger University of Mississippi Kendra Gentry John Jay College of Criminal Justice Kristine Trever Virginia Commonwealth University Presented at the 4th Annual Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America February 2-3, 2009 “Eyewitness testimony is the crack cocaine of the criminal justice system.” -Steve McGonigle and Jennifer Emily “Mistaken Identities” – The Dallas Morning News […]
Ted Gest and Deborah Halpern Wenger of Criminal Justice Journalists examine crime coverage in 2007, including major stories such as the Virginia Tech shootings and the “Jena Six” case.