About the Lecture

Rates of gun violence have skyrocketed in the United States in recent years, with President Biden declaring it an epidemic in 2021. Philadelphia has been hit particularly hard by this crisis. News reporting on this issue has long been critiqued by media scholars for being extractive, oversimplified, and racialized.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from fields of journalism and communication, public health, surgery, and nursing, are collaborating with The Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting on several projects to explore the impact of current news coverage of firearm violence.

Studies include interviews with victims and co-victims, textual and content analyses of local television news, analysis of spatial disparities in reporting, and experiments. The goal of this work is to produce scholarship that applies to making gun violence reporting more ethical and effective in terms of searching for solutions.

Join Dr. MIdberry as she presents some of the team’s completed projects and provides an overview of their research agenda.   

About Dr. Midberry

Dr. Jennifer Midberry is an assistant professor in Lehigh University's Journalism and Communication Department and an alum of Temple’s Media and Communication Ph.D. program. 

Her research explores how journalism practice can be improved to create more ethical coverage of marginalized groups and be more effective at evoking audience empathy and engagement with critical social issues. As a former photographer and photo editor, much of her work focuses on photojournalism. Her projects are intended to have practical insights for visual journalists in addition to advancing visual communication and journalism theory.

Before her academic career, she worked as a visual journalist for organizations such as The Philadelphia Daily News, the Associated Press, AOL News, and ABC News.