灾难如何报道《Danwei.org的英文评论，给外语读者》

http://www.danwei.org/sichuan_earthquake/how_to_report_on_disasters.php

A manual for reporting on disasters

Published earlier this year How to Report on Disasters (灾难如何报道) takes a look at how the media reports on traumatic situations with a focus on last year's Sichuan Earthquake.

In the first part of the book author Li Zixin a former journalist who now works at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication and runs the internationally-focused group blog iColumn interviews journalists about their experiences reporting from Sichuan. The interviews address some of the major issues surrounding disaster reporting in China: making the decision to go to the scene in defiance of a general ban on outside reporting interacting with victims being prepared for hardship and dealing with the unanticipated distinguishing from that of everyone else filing similar reports and handling reader reactions.

And also how to deal with it afterward as in this segment of an interview with Yang Lei a features reporter with the 21st Century Business Herald who stayed overnight in Beichuan:

Li: Did you have any psychological problems after you returned?

Yang: After I came back I wasn't all that eager to talk with them about it. I only was willing to chat a little with the people I'd gone with. A lot of people after they came back felt like they were really living authentically and they selectively forgot certain things.

Li: Did you need to do any psychological readjustment after coming back?

Yang: After I came back I started to be afraid of silence. The newspaper had arranged for me to rest at home but after two days I came back to work. There were so many people in the office and the hubbub calmed me. My family lives on the 16th floor and when it was particularly quiet I'd think of what that night [in Beichuan] was like. I can't take silence now. I have to turn on the TV when I'm writing.

Li: Do you think you'll gradually get back to normal?

Yang: I think I will because I've had a lot of experience reporting on emergency situations from SARS in 2003 to a fair number of mine disasters like Taipingshan and Xingtai and I went to the Songhua River pollution affair the Kaixian gas blowout and the Baotou plane crash. So I think that I have a pretty good ability to adjust.

Li: Did you encounter any firsts in this visit?

Yang: I've never cried in the course of my visits before but this time I cried. It wasn't in Beichuan it was in the helicopter going to Maoxian. When I got there I found that the person I was supposed to meet wasn't there so I said I'd just go on to Maoxian to wait there. Then a colleague suggested visiting the Red Cross and we took a helicopter back which was also carrying a group of orphan. The moment we took off the kids looked out the window at their home and started bawling really loudly all of them. I suddenly had the thought that they'd probably never had the chance to leave their hometown before growing up in the mountains but now they were seeing their hometown for the last time before leaving so I cried along with them. I left everything I had to eat and drink with them and divided up all the money I was carrying leaving my name and phone because I was afraid someone would steal the money from them. Right then I was crying uncontrollably. The pilot of that helicopter was Qiu Guanghua who later died in a crash.

The journalists interviewed are drawn from a range of media outlets from newspapers and magazines to television and Li also includes a few foreign journalists too: Lucy Hornby and David Gray of Reuters and Edward Cody of the Washington Post. Yau Lop-poon of Yazhou Zhoukan provides a Hong Kong perspective and Qian Gang who reported on the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake compares his experiences of three decades before to the present day.

Part II is aimed more at practicing journalists: it's a short handbook to the practice of trauma journalism translated from materials prepared by the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma that provides journalists with strategies for protecting themselves and interacting with victims.

Part III turns to the 2004 Asian Tsunami and deals with some of the same questions that the earthquake reporters discussed in the interviews in Part I. Foreign voices like Time's Zoher Abdoolcarim a Ryukoku University journalism professor Nani Afrida of the Jakarta Post and Dandhy Dwi Laksono of Indonesia's Aechkita.com join mainstream Chinese journalists. Part IV contains brief looks by Qian Gang and Lu Yuegang at how disaster reporting in China has changed over the years.

Even given its positioning as a reference for journalists within China the interviews and stories in this book give outsiders an in-depth behind-the-scenes look into how Chinese journalism works in a particular field much in the same way that the Southern Weekly-affiliated Backstage series (published like How to Report on Disasters by Nanfang Daily Press) does for a wider range of topics.