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WASHINGTON - The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation announced today that its Journalism Safety Guide and its Journalism Safety Modules have been updated to include information and resources for journalists to safely covering elections.
The updated Journalism Safety Guide, aimed at graduate journalism students, and updated Journalism Safety Modules, intended for undergraduate journalism students, are available here.
“In addition to the new election coverage lessons, there are new resources added throughout the curricula to keep our training as up-to-date as possible,” said James W. Foley Legacy Foundation Education Program Director Tom Durkin.
The new modules include resources on covering elections from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Journalists’ Network, Poynter, and other organizations. The information stresses the need for journalists, especially journalists just starting their careers, to take precautions when covering political events, including the importance of completing risk assessments in advance of covering rallies, protests, political conventions and Election Day itself.
Also included is information on legal issues that journalists may face as well as ways to combat misinformation and disinformation.
Durkin was aided in the curricula review and update by members of the Foley Foundation’s Journalism Safety Curriculum Task Force, whose members are Kathleen McElroy, Journalism Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication; Eric Phillips, Program Manager, Office of Language Programming at Voice of America; Nathan Puffer, Senior Vice President, Risk and Resilience at Dow Jones; Jason Reich, Vice President of Safety and Security at The New York Times; and Hannah Storm, Founder and Co-director of Headlines Network.
McElroy said recent protests on university campuses demonstrated the need for safety training for student journalists as well as journalists generally.
“The protests, counterprotests and police reaction on campuses this past spring made it clear that safety training isn’t just for professional newsrooms,” she said.
VOA’s Eric Phillips said the new election information is a crucial addition. “Elections are consequential moments for reporters who place themselves on the front lines of often tense and significant moments while reporting on candidates, controversial issues and protests. Journalists need to know how to act and react. The new curriculum highlights the critical elements of good communication and action plans and explain why they are important when reporters are confronted or subjected to physical harassment in an increasingly polarized political climate.”
For more information about the Foley Foundation’s journalism safety resources, contact Tom Durkin at tom.durkin@jamesfoleyfoundation.org.
This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, founded shortly after James Foley’s Aug. 19, 2014, brutal murder by ISIS after 21 months in captivity. He had been covering the Syrian civil war for Global Post and Agence France Presse at the time of his capture.
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