Skip to content
Menu

Safety essay assignment

Essay on Safety While Photographing In Person During Emergency Situations.

Write a 750 word essay on how to keep safe while reporting in emergency situations. Please quote liberally from the three required sources.

Your writing style for this essay should be journalistic. Keep your writing tight and paragraphs short. Read an essay in the NYTimes.com or Washingtonpost.com or Atalnticmagazine.com for examples. 

This is not an opinion piece. It should be third person writing, it should not include your opinion, and all facts must be offered as quotes that are sourced.

Your lede graf should summarize what you have learned from three sources.
The video ‘Keeping Safe’
The panel discussion, Keeping Safe While Reporting
Interview a photojournalist who has photographed an emergency situation.
You can add a fourth source if you like.

Your nut graf, (your second or third graf) should state what your essay is about. 

You can give some facts about the emergency situation, Covid 19, that photographers are working in, and what precautions they need to take.

You can explain other emergency situations found in required sources. As you do that you can quote how photographers manage to keep safe.

Raise some interesting questions, and then answer them.

Examples of some questions you can answer:

• Why did Mary Knox refuse to leave the scene of a police shooting when she was ordered to by police?
• How and why do photographers need to keep out of the way of first responders?
• Why are photojournalists also sometimes referred to as first responders?
• How should inexperienced photographers cover a protest for the first time? And what safety tips can you explain? 
• Would you think to check the wind direction and put on a gas mask when photographing a chemical spill?
• When photographing in a place that you are unfamiliar, who should you talk to? Is there such a thing as stupid questions in that situations.
• What do photographers report on during a protest.

Please quote your sources.