This program at the National Press Club might interest some regionals:

 CIA informants gone bad. Terrorists who slip through security. What’s the real risk? The National Press Club in Washington hosts two seminars to help you cover those and a host of other stories that involve risk. Plane crashes, food poisoning, climate change to terrorism, the environment, health and public safety: they all have key questions reporters must answer in order to tell audiences whether something is risky and, if so, how much. These sessions will also help you understand how people perceive risk — why some people are “freaked out” about relatively small ones but are not more concerned about really big ones.

 Our series of two 1.5 hour seminars will be held Wedneday, Jan. 13 through Friday, Jan. 15 at various times and will be presented by Harvard instructor and former Emmy award-winning television reporter David Ropeik. Ropeik is co-author of RISK: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You and author of the forthcoming How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Match The Facts. 

SESSION I: The Basic Components of Risk (it’s more than statistical “odds) 

SESSION II: The Psychology of Risk Perception

These sessions are free for National Press Club members and $10 per session for non-members; coffee and snacks provided as are resource materials. See the various session times and sign up online at: http://press.org/library/riskreporting/.  

The seminars are sponsored by the NPC Eric Friedheim National Journalism Library’s Professional Development Committee with support from the Lounsbery Foundation, a foundation aimed at helping the public understand science and technology. Classes will be held in the library’s Bloomberg Center for Electronic Journalism classroom.  For more information, contact committee Chairwoman Susan Heavey at sheavey@reuters.com

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