The Center for Just Journalism, an organization that acts as a resource for journalists covering crime and safety, presents Teaching Public Safety Reporting, an all-day gathering for journalism educators.
WHEN: Wednesday June 18, 9am-6pm
WHERE: New Orleans Marriott (before the IRE conference)
WHO: Facilitated by Lewis Raven Wallace and Lauren Lee White. Participants must apply by the EXTENDED DEADLINE of May 2 and be accepted to join this gathering.
WHAT: At many colleges and universities, journalism students are taught to do “crime reporting” that reflects outdated ideas about what harms our communities and what keeps them safe. Please join us as we build a community of like-minded journalism instructors who aim to transform journalism education and help students rethink coverage of public safety, crime, and violence.
Together, we’ll spend a day discussing the challenges (and joys!) of teaching public safety reporting. We will share curricula and resources for creating a strong public safety reporting syllabus and supplementing core classes, discuss attracting more students to the beat, and build relationships and community as teachers engaged in this work. The Center for Just Journalism has developed a resource library for journalism instructors which we will engage with during this gathering.
Teaching Public Safety Reporting aims to help transform the future of public safety journalism through education, and to bring together an enduring cohort of instructors who ask questions, commiserate, celebrate, and collaborate.
The program is open to educators who teach journalism at the high school, college, or graduate level.
COST: Participation in the cohort is free and food will be provided during the day of the gathering. Some financial support for travel to New Orleans is available (see application questions below).
Participants who also want to attend IRE must register separately for the conference held from June 19-22 at the same location.
Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is an award-winning independent journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. He's the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. Lewis previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is the Abolition Journalism Fellow with Interrupting Criminalization, under the leadership of transformative justice visionaries Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie. He is also a 2021 Ford Global Fellow and a 2020 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow, and a cofounder in 2019 of Press On, a southern movement journalism collective. His second book, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change from Within, will be out from Beacon Press in October 2025. Lewis is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South. Lauren Lee White (she) is a journalist covering public safety. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, PRI, the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere, often with the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is currently working on a longform historical piece for GQ. In 2018, she received a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to report on sexual misconduct at the Los Angeles County women’s jail. Lauren was a John Jay College/H.F. Guggenheim Reporting Fellow at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in 2016 and a Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in 2015. Lauren is an instructor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and has taught Introduction to Investigative Reporting at the School of the New York Times. Previously, she worked as a documentary filmmaker in New York City, where she was an instructor with the Tribeca Film Institute, the JFK Center for Performing Arts, and the Downtown Community TV Center.