Forum: When Public Health and Journalism Collide
In an era of earthquakes, tsunamis, oil spills, mine explosions and wars, public health professionals and journalists often find themselves drawn to the same scene, grappling with the same issues – sometimes collaborating and other times colliding.
These complex interactions are the focus of a unique, one-day conference at BU, “When Disaster Strikes: Reporting and Responding.”
The event is co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and BU’s Center for Global Health and Development, School of Public Health and College of Communication. It will be held on April 14, from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, at the Boston University Photonics Center.
The aim of the conference is to bring journalists, health care professionals and other aid workers together to share information about their roles and responsibilities – to their work, the public, and to one another. Journalists rely on public health specialists to provide information, context and real-life narratives to make a crisis come alive, often under pressing deadlines. Health professionals and aid workers, meanwhile, are sometimes untrained in dealing with the media and can be left feeling ambushed.
The conference will feature a wide range of experts from the fields of global health, NGOs and journalism, as well as citizens and volunteers who will use this first Pulitzer Center-BU collaboration to examine the complicated aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The gathering is an attempt to establish strategies to allow journalists and aid workers to function collaboratively, with minimal interference.
Kerry Sanders, NBC’s Miami-based correspondent since 1996, will serve as keynote speaker. He has covered news mainly in the South and throughout Latin America. Sanders contributes regularly to “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Today,” MSNBC and occasionally to “Dateline NBC.” He was a member of the NBC Nightly News reporting team that was awarded a Peabody and the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. He also was one of NBC’s embedded reporters during the Iraq war, traveling with the U.S. Marine Corps, and has extensively covered the war on terror in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
For more information on the conference, go to http://www.bu.edu/cghd/news/calendar/when-disaster-strikes/.
Submitted by Lisa Chedekel