Covering Suicide
It’s been one week since Parrish acting police chief Sonny Sorrell committed suicide near a granite memorial to slain police officers in downtown Birmingham. News coverage was full of accounts of the suicide and that of a woman found hanging under a bridge in northern Alabama. Suicide is a very tricky thing for journalists to cover — and mental health professionals say if it’s not covered well a lot of harm can result. In the latest installment of our Making Sense of Mental Health series, reporter Francesca Rosko talks with Lisa Hermes of the Birmingham Crisis Center.
Jenn Burleson-MacKay knows first hand the difficulty of covering suicide. She teaches reporting classes at the University of Alabama and several years ago, as a reporter in Virginia, she had to cover the suicide of a teenage girl named Galen. The story made national news because a man who sold drugs to Galen was charged with murder.
A proposed Bessemer data center faces new hurdles: a ‘road to nowhere’ and the Birmingham darter
With the City Council in Bessemer scheduled to vote Tuesday on a “hyperscale” data center, challenges from an environmental group and the Alabama Department of Transportation present potential obstacles for the wildly unpopular project.
Birmingham Museum of Art’s silver exhibit tells a dazzling global story
Silver and Ceremony is made up of more than 150 suites of silver, sourced from India, and some of their designs.
Mentally ill people are stuck in jail because they can’t get treatment. Here’s what’s to know
Hundreds of people across Alabama await a spot in the state’s increasingly limited facilities, despite a consent decree requiring the state to address delays in providing care for people who are charged with crimes but deemed too mentally ill to stand trial. But seven years since the federal agreement, the problem has only worsened.
Ivey appoints Will Parker to Alabama Supreme Court
Parker fills the court seat vacated by Bill Lewis who was tapped by President Donald Trump for a federal judgeship. The U.S. Senate last month confirmed Lewis as a U.S. district judge.
How Alabama Power kept bills up and opposition out to become one of the most powerful utilities in the country
In one of the poorest states in America, the local utility earns massive profits producing dirty energy with almost no pushback from state regulators.
No more Elmo? APT could cut ties with PBS
The board that oversees Alabama Public Television is considering disaffiliating from PBS, ending a 55-year relationship.
