Professors Marguerite Moritz and Jeff Browne will be the keynote speakers at this year’s fall convention. They will lead sessions on both Thursday and Friday.
Thursday Evening:
School Crises: Challenges for Professional and Student Journalists
In this session Professors Browne and Moritz examine the ethical and emotional issues faced by journalists covering the trauma of a school shooting.
Sixteen years ago, coverage of the Columbine shootings set off a national debate on how such difficult stories should be handled by professional journalists. This session will examine some of the ethical issues that emerged during the Columbine coverage including informed consent of witnesses, cell phone audio and video, live coverage from the scene and and the role of the audience in providing feedback to journalists. In addition, we will examine how student journalists have handled coverage when shootings and other crises occur in their own schools.
Friday:
Taking the Lede: Documenting Scholastic Journalism
In this session we’ll explore the in and outs of video storytelling. The stories we examine involve high school students who challenged authority, helped set federal and state law, conducted undercover investigations and wrote about intimate emotional issues that are not frequently covered in student media.
Marguerite Moritz is UNESCO Chair, Fulbright Senior Specialist and Professor Emerita from University of Colorado, Boulder. She has written extensively on the intersection of race, class and gender in visual depictions of women, gays, Muslims and other marginalized groups. Her work on crisis reporting began 15 years ago when she wrote, produced and directed the documentary Covering Columbine. It examines journalistic ethics in reporting school shootings. She has presented her work in more than 20 countries and has been a visiting scholar at universities across China, France, South Africa and Scandinavia.
Jeff Browne is the director of CU News Corps, an investigative news venture housed in the College of Media, Communication and Information at the University of Colorado. In addition to the documentary “Taking the Lede,” News Corps students produce in-depth multimedia stories for news outlets across the state and the U.S. Prior to joining the CU faculty, Jeff was the executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association and the Colorado High School Press Association; served as the director of Student Media at Colorado State University; taught high school journalism in Colorado; and worked as a sports reporter in Florida.
