Center for Community Media to Host ‘Reporting in an Age of Conflict’

How Can Journalists Report on Divisive Topics Without Causing More Polarization?

On June 11, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. (EST), the Center for Community Media (CCM) at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY will host “Reporting in an Age of Conflict.” This in-person workshop and fireside chat focuses on what journalists can learn from conflict mediators about reporting on polarizing topics with deep empathy, humanity, and nuance.

Hélène Biandudi Hofer, Journalist & Co-Founder of Good Conflict, will serve as instructor.

Hélène Biandudi Hofer is a broadcast journalist, documentary filmmaker, media entrepreneur, and conflict navigation coach. She led an award-winning TV news magazine program in Western New York for nearly a decade, exploring remedies to societal challenges. Her work spans investigating police reform in Camden, New Jersey, to examining education opportunities in South Sudan. Hélène is a founding principal of Good Conflict, LLC, along with fellow journalist and writer Amanda Ripley. Good Conflict helps communities, companies, and groups get smarter about how they fight. Through her work in conflict, Hélène has trained nearly two thousand journalists across 175 newsrooms worldwide on how to transform their coverage of controversial and divisive issues. Hélène has worked with CBS, NPR, and PBS and collaborated with reporters, filmmakers, and journalist-serving organizations around the globe. Hélène credits her passion for journalism and storytelling to her great-grandmother, the oral historian of the Biandudi family in Kinshasa, Congo.

The Good Conflict reporting style applies the practices of conflict mediation, solutions journalism, and social psychology to the storytelling process. It is designed to help journalists adapt what they do for our current age of political polarization, based on everything researchers now know about what humans need to thrive in a highly interdependent, information-saturated, fast-changing world.

The content discussed and the skills learned here will apply to journalists reporting on everything from local school board meetings to inter-community conflicts to international disputes.

What you will learn in this workshop: a shared vocabulary for covering conflict, an understanding of the deeper, hidden, more interesting stories underneath a conflict that helps cut through the noise, how to use deep listening/looping to find the understory, and how to use revealing questions to help excavate the deeper meaning behind discord.