Free virtual webinar: Thursday, August 27, 2pm ET / 1pm CT / 11am PT
Instructor:
Kate Parkinson, Risk and Safety Manager, Journalism Protection Initiative
Journalists and newsroom leaders face a wide range of safety challenges—from online harassment and doxing to field reporting, digital security, and protecting their families. Yet for many small and community newsrooms, limited time and resources make it difficult to build proactive safety planning into day-to-day operations.
This hands-on session, developed by the Center for Community Media in partnership with the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY, will help participants build practical, personalized approaches to newsroom safety. You’ll learn how to identify your newsroom’s specific risks, ask the right questions before assignments, and develop safety plans that reflect your reporting environment, staff, and workflows.
We’ll also introduce JESS, a personalized safety planning tool that helps journalists think through real-world scenarios and create actionable plans tailored to their unique circumstances.
Following the session, 10 attendees will have the opportunity to participate in free one-on-one consultations with Kate to work through the specific safety challenges facing their newsroom.
No prior safety training experience is required. This session is designed to meet newsrooms where they are and provide practical tools that can be adapted to different reporting environments and organizational capacities.
The event will be held online using Zoom. Please follow the instructions you receive after registering. Email if you do not receive a confirmation message or if you have any questions.
Instructor
Kate Parkinson is a journalist turned safety specialist working to embed safety, resilience and well-being into the culture of journalism. She is the Risk and Safety Manager at the Journalism Protection Initiative. Drawing on 15 years as a foreign correspondent and documentary producer, she brings firsthand experience of the physical, digital, legal and psychological risks journalists face. That perspective now shapes her work at the Journalism Protection Initiative, where she helps strengthen safety and resilience across journalism education and practice. Before joining JPI, Kate worked at The Associated Press, where she launched the organization’s first Peer Support Network and led its Resilience at AP initiative. She also co-founded Head Set, a company that used virtual reality to make safety and resilience training more accessible and impactful, reaching more than 2,000 journalists in over 30 countries. Her work with Head Set earned her the 2020–21 UKRI Woman in Innovation Award.
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