As we examine our impact during the first five years at PCGVR, there are lots of things we can count having done.
But are we making things happen? We have certainly been there at a few important turning points.
The first outcome came early: Several Philadelphia news organizations added resources for the gun violence survivor community to their web sites following the call from Michelle Kerr-Spry, a mother whose son had been taken by gun violence. She was speaking on a panel during our inaugural Better Gun Violence Reporting Summit in late 2019.
In 2020, PCGVR founder Jim MacMillan was invited to consult on developing and then advised the journalists reporting Gun Violence in Missouri, a two-year statewide solutions reporting project supported by Report for America and based at the Kansas City Star.
In 2021, WHYY public radio here in Philadelphia posted a job opening for a Gun Violence Prevention Reporter, a job title we had never seen before, two years after we convened that Summit at their headquarters. They soon hired two and then a third last year.
WHYY’s local news site Billy Penn has shared highlights from our newsletter in their newsletter each Wednesday for five years and added gun violence prevention news to the their main menu.
Philadelphia’s Pen & Pencil Club, the nation’s oldest press club, added a Gun Violence Prevention Reporting category to their Philly News Awards in 2024. They also recognized PCGVR as our city’s “Nontraditional News Provider of the Year” in 2023. Philadelphia Magazine named two PCGVR staffers among their 150 Most Influential Philadelphians last year as well.
When The Trace, the only national news organization focused entirely on reporting gun violence and prevention, announced plans to open a second bureau in 2021, we very aggressively encouraged them to come to Philadelphia, where they now have three reporting staffers.
The Association of Health Care Journalists invited several of us to their Summit in 2022. Soon after, they created a new position called Health Beat Leader for Firearm Violence and Trauma and hired one of the Missouri solutions reporters for the role. In 2025, they added five Firearm Violence Reporting Fellows.
One year after PCGVR director of research Dr. Jessica Beard began her Stoneleigh Foundation Fellowship, the organization committed the entire next class of their Emerging Leader Fellows to gun violence prevention projects, including our Survivor Connection director Oronde McClain, and another class just recently.
Dr. Beard’s NIH grant appears to be the first federal funding to research gun violence prevention and the role of the media, essentially creating a new area of inquiry for others to follow.
An editor at AL.com, the web site representing three Alabama news organizations, informed us that they hired a “violence prevention reporter” in 2023, based on the work of PCGVR. Alaina Bookman got the job and later shared how she brought our workshop guidance into their newsroom.
The Associated Press Stylebook, journalism’s most important reference, now includes our guidance and a link to our web site. Last year we saw young journalists feverishly take notes at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, as AP editors introduced our work.
PCGVR staffers Zoomed into dozens of US newsrooms for several years, informing a course titled Transforming Local Crime Reporting Into Public Safety Journalism, led by the Poynter Institute; our nation’s leading media ethics organization.
And we can only imagine what our many college and university visits, virtual and in-person newsroom meetings and journalism and research conference panels would have looked like without us, or if they would have happened at all. Or the reach of 150 news reports that have introduced our work. Or the impact on the hundreds to people who have attended our film festivals and documentary screenings.
We are already beginning to see news reports raising the voices of community experts who have participated in our new Survivor Connection project. And we just launched a new national Association of Gun Violence Reporters, where we are seeing new members are signing up each week.
Shortly before the end of the Biden administration, we had the opportunity to introduce our work the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and participate in a webinar hosted by the Center for Disease Control, which hundreds attended.
And we informally learned that the our work was known to the team behind last year’s Surgeon General’s Advisory, which declared firearm violence a public health crisis in America but also shared our concerns, stating in a companion video that:
“Beyond these precious lives that are lost to firearm violence, there are wider ripples of harm to those who are injured, who witnessed the incidents, who live in urban and rural communities where such violence takes place, and who constantly read and hear about firearm violence in the news.“
We don’t know when we will have a federal government focused on gun violence prevention again, but the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania got behind our guidance closer to home just last month, advising in their new Resources for Victims of Gun Violence Initiative:
“Train journalists on trauma-informed reporting and interactions with violence-affected individuals… These efforts could inform residents about community issues and events, available resources and services when violence occurs, and could encourage readers to provide input into neighborhood issues.“
To keep up with PCGVR, you can subscribe to our free Weekly Brief newsletter and follow us on Bluesky. We also have five years’ worth of free resources available on our website, including our Better Gun Violence Reporting Toolkit.
Here’s what you can do
We have come this far with a very small staff on a very lean budget. With more support, we could hire more people, accelerate activities and produce more impact, sooner. Please consider making a contribution today.