Many of this week’s readings made me think a lot about what we’ve talked about in the Dart Centre sessions about safety, empathy, and the emotional cost of witnessing. Each story, in its own way, showed how reporting in high-risk situations requires extensive preparation and ethics: how to stay safe, how to stay human, and how to tell the truth without turning someone else’s trauma into your material.
Caitlin Dickerson’s reporting on the Darién Gap feels like a textbook example of what the Dart trainers meant when they talked about trauma-informed reporting. She meets and reports on migrants as people, rather than victims. You can feel that she’s careful and aware of the power imbalance between a reporter who can leave and the people who can’t. When she describes the jungle swallowing bodies, she’s not trying to shock the reader, and instead asks them to understand what policy really looks like on the ground.
The same awareness of what it means to enter someone else’s crisis runs through The Embeds from CJR. The journalists there talk about living with military units, witnessing raids and violence, and the strange blur that happens when you’re too close to the story. Colonel William Darley mentions that every embed is like “seeing the war through a straw.” It’s exactly what the Dart people meant about perspective: access is not the same as understanding. You can be there, literally in the middle of it, and still miss the bigger truth if you forget to step back.
Caitlin Doornbos’ Ukraine reporting felt like another side of the same lesson. She talks about needing to “go to the scene” because she couldn’t tell the story from behind a desk. But she also reminds us that showing up doesn’t mean throwing yourself into danger blindly. It’s easy to romanticize bravery in journalism, but her reporting makes it clear that responsibility is part of it too. You protect yourself so you can keep telling stories.
All these stories circle back to what the Dart Centre kept emphasizing: journalism is relational. You have to think about what your presence does to the people you’re covering—and to you. The best work doesn’t come from detachment, but from respect. Rather than being fearless, it’s about being careful, and still choosing to look.
