Making News: Jina Moore and More Ochberg Fellows

Jina Moore in Rwanda has this article in CJR about writing about rape. ”I’ve been at work this last year on a series of diverse projects,” she writes. “About a courageous collective of women journalists in eastern Congo; about insurance for livestock (aka “bank accounts”) in northern Kenya; about the UN Peacebuilding Commisison (funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting); about asylum; about remembrance in Rwanda … and many other things.” Get updates on her website at www.jinamoore.com.

Lori Grinker will sit on a panel discussion March 15 with Tim Hetherington, Jennifer Karady, and Suzanne Opton at RISD, “Picturing Soldiers: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Contemporary Soldier Photographs.” Zoe Wool of the University of Toronto will moderate. A screening of the film Restrepo, which is co-directed by Hetherington, will take place at the RISD Auditorium after the discussion.

Columbine expert Dave Cullen gives advice on memorializing the Tucson shootings: Start fund-raising even before a memorial design is in place. People connected to the Columbine High School massacre “didn’t realize that there’s a certain window of opportunity and willingness,” Cullen said. “A lot of people don’t really care about the exact particulars. They want to contribute to what’s going to be a memorial.”

Moni Basu of CNN is teaching “magazines” on Mondays at the University of Georgia. She joins a handful of other prominent experts, including David Lowery of the band Cracker, who are personalizing their lessons. “Being able to draw from personal experiences really personalizes the information,” Basu said.

Susan Greene, who resigned a few months ago from the Denver Post after being told her column would be discontinued, is blogging for the Huffington Post.

Margarita Akhvlediani is in Armenia for GoGroup Media. She is conducting a three-day workshop with the journalists from the Armenian territories that survived bloody ethnic wars in the 1990s. They live behind closed borders, she said. “It will be the first time for all of 12 participants to meet a person representing the ‘other’ side.”

John McCusker heads to France this spring to deliver a presentation on Katrina at Lumière University Lyon 2. McCusker is curating a show of 40 photographs from the Times-Picayune’s collection and speaking at a panel discussion. “I will be aiming to touch on trauma, trauma journalism and the job of covering Armageddon in your hometown,” he said.

Huascar Robles’s exhibit went up last week in San Juan. “Los Silencios de Santurce” (The Silences of Santurce) is at the Blanche Kellogg Citadel Center and shows through 25 photographs moments in this most densely populated part of Puerto Rico. “The town of Santurce suffered a massive transformation through urban renewal initiatives that influenced its racial, architectural and cultural diversity,” Robles writes. “I aimed to chronicle these changes through all that had been removed. Those silences remind us constantly of what was there. It immortalizes the cityscape as it was, while simultaneously offering space for new interpretations to build a whole new paradigm.”

(Note: This column uses Google alerts (mostly). If you come across items not mentioned, please email Deirdre at dartsociety@gmail.com, or feel free to post them.)