Reporting on Road Safety: Guide for Journalists

If you and your news organization are still covering road traffic fatalities the way news organizations have always covered them — as random, isolated “accidents” with sad but largely unavoidable consequences for the victims — you are missing one of the major news stories of our time.

Simply put, the carnage on the world’s roads is a public health crisis of epic proportions. The global death toll has already reached 1.24 million a year and is predicted to reach 1.9 million by 2030 unless something is done to reverse the current trend.

As a journalist, you have the opportunity to put this crisis in its proper perspective, to educate your audience and increase public awareness — and ultimately to influence government authorities, policymakers and other stakeholders to take the steps necessary to fix the problem.

Reporting on road safety requires more than a passing familiarity with the driving statistics of an individual country. As a journalist, you must dig beneath the numbers to understand the complex interplay of the many factors that ultimately lead to a road traffic fatality. Road safety is a much bigger story than the fatal crash buried inside the pages of this morning’s newspaper.

This is a guide for journalists who want to tell the bigger story.