Hi everyone,

The past few days have been relentless – and the coverage has been marked by thoughtful, responsive and accessible reporting across every platform.

(Poynter, among many others, took notice, with a special addition in its daily newsletter: "I just wanted to take a moment," The Poynter Report's Tom Jones wrote Thursday morning, "to point out the superb coverage from the various news outlets in the Twin Cities.")

We’re putting our August newsletter on pause this week, to give everyone space to keep doing this important work. 

In the meantime, we want to say we are so grateful for you, for your work and for this incredible service you continue to provide for our community: From the breaking news and rolling coverage to the investigative folos and context to the resources for talking to kids about tragedy how to help the community. You have built a cadence of ongoing coverage and created spaces for people to process and collectively mourn. 

And, the truth is, nobody in your newsroom is untouched by this trauma. It affects the reporters and photographers deployed on the front lines; the editors, producers, designers and ops teams back in the newsroom; the hosts, digital producers, engagement teams and others who are receiving and processing the images, interviews, audio and tape from the field. It touches us all. 

To say this work is difficult doesn’t encapsulate it. Our communities are processing, grieving, reeling — and so are our newsrooms, our colleagues. So are we.

The Minnesota Journalism Center team wants to support you in this work — now, and in the weeks ahead. 

We know that the cumulative effects of covering multiple traumas these past few months can have lasting impacts, and we want you to know that we’re looking for ways to help our journalism community navigate. 

First: We’ve put together some resources for taking care — of yourself and others — as you walk through this week’s coverage. 

Among them:

• Check in with each other. Regularly. Create space for honest responses, and encourage people to take breaks and seek care, whatever that looks like for them.

• When you can, check in with yourself. Pause, breathe, ground your feet and put your hand on your chest. Notice how you’re feeling.

• Pay attention to your colleagues’ (and your own) trauma load, whether it’s direct or secondary exposure to the facts of the traumatic incident or other people’s experiences of it. Share the burden of coverage whenever possible.

• Ground yourself in the mission. Revisit the purpose and focus of your newsroom’s coverage approach, and keep it front of mind. Declare your own role in that purpose, and find ways to honor it whenever possible.

• Acknowledge and appreciate. Whenever you can, take stock of your work, and that of your peers and your colleagues – appreciate the big and small, recognize the contributions and the impact.

We hope this roundup and the resources within it are useful to you, no matter your role in the newsroom, but particularly to editors and leads, as you look out for your colleagues and teams.

Next: We've included in the roundup some tools and best practices for interviewing children after traumatic situations.

In those most delicate of interviews, trauma-informed practices matter.

Finally: We’re working with our colleagues at the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma (formerly the Dart Center) to develop some opportunities for structured debriefs, training and other resources in the coming weeks. And we’ll be checking in with editors and newsroom leads about resources or tools that might be most helpful to their teams.

But we don’t want to leave it there. If there are tools, resources, trainings or other offerings that you or your colleagues would find supportive now or going forward, please let us know. We are here to support and serve journalists across the state, and always appreciate your insights. 

You’ll be hearing from us soon about more opportunities. 

In the meantime: Take care. We'll catch up with you next week.

All our best,

The MJC Team: Ben, Meg, Regina and G.G.

Stay in touch with the Minnesota Journalism Center: If you'd like to receive news from the Minnesota journalism community; ways to connect with other Minnesota journalists; all of the MJC's events; and opportunities for training and working with University of Minnesota students in your newsroom, you can sign up for the MJC's newsletter — and read earlier editions — here.