Glenda Cooper
Journalism frequently throws up difficult ethical issues for reporters to confront in pressurised and quick-reaction situations. This is particularly true of the ‘deathknock’ where journalists interview grieving family and friends in the aftermath of a sudden death (Duncan, 2012). These stories, because they are stressful and disliked, are often given to the youngest and most inexperienced reporters in the newsroom (Cooper, 2012) but the consequences of getting it wrong can be devastating for both family and journalist (Newton and Duncan, 2012, 2014). Journalism students often express reluctance and lack of confidence when it comes to the core skill of interviewing; interacting with those who have just suffered a traumatic loss or experience is even more difficult (Adams, 2012; Maxson, 2000). This paper examines how, by using forum theatre in which situations are both acted out but also interrogated (Flores, 2000), third-year undergraduate journalism students at City co-created a series of simulated experiences of confronting such issues in a brave space. Key to the approach was empowering the students themselves to construct the scenario, when necessary stop the action, re-run the situation and thus work out appropriate and ethical choices when covering such stories.
The paper takes an ethnographic action research (EAR) approach to try to consider not just what we are doing and why, but how we can do it differently or better (Tacchi, 2020). It seeks to answer the following research questions:
RQ1: How can forum theatre aid journalism students in developing better interviewing skills for traumatic situations?
RQ2: What do students feel about using more creative approaches to this subject?
RQ3: How could these techniques be applied more widely in journalism pedagogy?
Learning outcomes for such practice would include: reaching defensible ethical decisions through use of appropriate tools and techniques, crafting rationales for ethical decisions suitable for articulation to audiences outside the newsroom and recognising the importance of social responsibility in the journalist.
References
Adams, S. 2012. Interviewing for journalists. London: Routledge.
Cooper. 2012 ‘Facing up to the Ethical uses of Facebook’, in Keeble, R. and Mair, J. (eds.) The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial Bury St. Edmunds: Abramis, pp. 353-230.
Duncan, S. 2012 ‘Sadly missed: The death knock news story as a personal narrative of grief’, Journalism, 13(5), pp. 589-603.
Flores, H. 2000 ‘From Freire to Boal.’, Education Links, (61), pp. 41-42.
Maxson, J. 2000. Training Journalism Students to Deal with Trauma: Observing Reporters Behave like ‘Creeps’. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 55(1), pp.79-86.
Newton, J. and Duncan, S. 2012 ‘Journalists and the bereaved: constructing a positive approach to the teaching of death reporting’, Journalism Education, 1(2), pp. 59-67.
Tacchi, J., 2020. Digital engagement: Voice and participation in development. In Digital anthropology (pp. 225-241). Routledge.
