You talk in your piece about viewing the work you were doing as a service, and I think it took you a while to see that work also as the work of a first responder. How do you see the work now?
The work I do now has changed. I’m a freelancer and have much more control over the stories I accept and how I go about reporting them — avoiding breaking news for now. But I also work for the Education Writers Association, a national nonprofit that supports journalists who write about education. And being more behind the scenes with them, I get to see a bigger picture, the similarities of local and national jobs — a large swath of education journalists and journalists outside the ed beat live each day ready to respond to tragedy. I don’t think this is talked about enough when it comes to appreciating the “crisis response” potential for this job.
Look at the Michigan State University shooting, or the killing of a broadcast journalist and a child in Orlando, or the most recent shooting in Louisville.
Journalism, especially, especially local news reporters, can act as first responders if and when you consider how information is among the first things you will be expecting during a crisis. They may be the first ones on scene. Consider, too, journalists reporting from the middle of protests, from outside a hostage situation, from the side of or when affected directly by natural disasters. These are people, particularly at the local level, who are part of the community they’re writing about and who are driven by a deep caring for the people and place around them. The information they provide goes to neighbors and residents, local government officials, state and federal officials who may use this information in making decisions about where to prioritize aid.
These are more intense examples, and I want to make space also for the investigators and enterprise and feature writers in this profession who work on the front line of providing information to the public that someone—governments, businesses, organizations—don’t want the public to know. It’s a public service to bring forth information, and not one everyone would be interested in dedicating their lives to providing.
What role do you think the local journalism industry itself played in the issues you faced?
This is tricky to answer because there are specifics of my job that were exacerbated by the pandemic -- isolation, loneliness, stress -- and then there are traits of American hustle culture that we take for granted and reinforce in so many jobs.
But, as local journalism is declining, news deserts are increasing, and more and more small teams or single people are tasked with covering a larger and larger geographic area, or broader beats, more corporate reward – which could include a sense of job security – go to stories that go viral from the behemoth news companies that rely on marketing revenue and online traffic.
In this industry, too, layoffs are targeting the more senior writers (higher paid employees), which leaves the younger crowd to figure out how to, in a sense, reinvent the wheel.
For these journalists remaining, a daily assignment may look like covering city and county government meetings while serving as your newspaper's only investigative reporter, or being hired as a K12 education reporter and also covering public health because of how closely the topics overlap. But it’s not possible to do all of this well and in-depth, which then feeds into a public perception that the press isn’t doing well, which is reinforced by government administrations that benefit from public suspicion of the press.
It’s a maddening cycle.
There’s never an "off" button for a lot of reporters, who also feel tasked with “beating” this public suspicion by focusing solely on “the job,” and I think that a lot of outlets have not evolved a healthy way to protect journalists in the environment of scarcity that we see today. “The job” has changed so much.
I could go on with this topic, and point to public harassment of journalists, of young journalists, of young women of color, of people of color in this industry, and of queer journalists (and journalists with intersectionality of all these identities). Sometimes that harassment is reinforced within the newsroom with the “shrug it off” mentality that comes also from being pushed to not consider yourself as part of the story. So, it makes spotting this harassment harder, and then knowing how to address it nearly impossible without an advocate.
For me, pandemic isolation and loneliness built on top of all of this, including harassment from public officials as I was doing what felt like the bare minimum of my job because it was all overwhelming that I… simply burnt out.
What's something someone reading this can do for themselves?
There’s so much to do when it comes to breaking through on this topic, and I appreciate so much the empathy you bring when reporting on this. When I was first looking around for words for what I was feeling, I was looking at studies of burnout among medical doctors. It was the only thing I could really find that labeled stressors similarly to my job. I did find one study on journalism burnout, but it was from the 90s and admitted that it was difficult to quantify because of how burnout in this profession is treated (I believe it paired high instances of alcoholism with journalism pretty well).
In brief, I want to add: Mental health symptoms are information, and that information about yourself is as important as the information you digest about other people. Journalists are trained to examine, analyze and have empathy for the people we write about—but turn this off immediately when it comes to ourselves. (A holistic approach to this may sound awful to some people who would rather compartmentalize it all, I understand.)
The biggest shift in myself and recovery was realizing how my actions could (and would) undermine my words. So, if I said I was exhausted and needed a break, but then didn’t take one and allowed myself to still be available, I was undermining what I had just told myself I needed most.
Sometimes the pause is all I require. I don’t need to know the fix to earn the pause.
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