“Ethics in the coverage of violence and interviewing victims,” a new online course of the Knight Center Lea en Español Leia em Português

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas will be offering a special two-week online course on “Ethics in the coverage of violence and interviewing victims,” in Spanish from June 25, 2012 through July 7, 2012. The instructor will be the Mexican journalist and academic Margarita Torres, co-founder of the organization Periodistas de a Pié.

Journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean can apply to this course until June 14, 2012, by 5 p.m. (Austin, Texas time). More details about the course can be found here.

The journalists accepted into the online course will pay a $30 administrative fee and a certificate of participation will be issued to those who comply with the course’s requirements.

This special two-week online course will help journalists to better understand the role of journalism ethics related to covering violence and interviewing victims of violence, how to create ethical protocols in the newsroom to handle these kind of journalistic situations, and techniques needed to interview persons affected by violence.

Torres is an academic at the Universidad Iberoamericana, in Mexico City, where she coordinates the Iberoamerican Right to Information project. She specializes in ethics and journalism, right to information, and journalistic professionalization in times of violence.

She is also co-founder of the Mexico City-based Periodistas de a Pié, a network of journalists who seek to share investigative techniques, strategies, reporting, narrative styles, ways of addressing ethical issues and ideas to strengthen coverage in their own work.

This special online course is divided into weekly modules containing multimedia presentations and links to online resources. Most of the course activities can be followed in the days and times more appropriate to each student, and a live webinar will be held each week during the course. Exercises, online discussions and additional assignments will also be part of the curriculum. Participants can expect to spend 5-10 hours per week on the course.

The course will be taught using the Knight Center’s distance learning platform that has benefited more than 6,000 journalists from Latin American and the Caribbean, since it was created in the fall of 2003.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas was created in 2002 by Professor Rosental Alves at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism. It was created thanks to generous donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Center also receives contributions from other donors, including the Open Society Foundations and The University of Texas at Austin. The Center’s main goal is to help journalists in Latin American and the Caribbean improve the quality of journalism in their countries.