What if it’s something else?! Email not displaying correctly?
View it in your browser ([link removed]) .
[link removed]
[link removed]

[link removed]
(Shutterstock)

Hi and happy 2024!
This is a quick edition as I wade through my inbox and launch something I’ve been working on for awhile. But I wanted to start our year with burnout. That sounds ominous. Actually, I wanted to start our year talking about burnout and how we might approach the whole concept differently.
I spent some time last year reporting on how other industries that are similar to journalism handle burnout. I was looking for strategies and tools, and I found them. But the more I researched education and emergency response/medicine, the more I started to wonder if our industry needed better language for burnout itself.
I wrote about this ([link removed]) for Poynter in a piece published last week. It gets down to this: When we talk about burnout, sometimes what we’re really talking about is secondary traumatic stress or demoralization. How we manage each matters.
This is a newsletter for and about local journalists, so why am I talking about this here? Like educators and first responders, local journalists are among the most vulnerable to burnout, demoralization and secondary traumatic stress. Our newsrooms are smaller than ever, and overwork is real. (That’s burnout.) Rounds of layoffs and continual bungling at the top hurt those still left doing the work. (That’s demoralization.) And the work itself, covering shootings and accidents and murders and corruption, can impact us, sometimes seriously. (That’s secondary traumatic stress.)
It helped me a lot to understand what we face in order to better battle it. I hope this piece helps you, too ([link removed]) .

A few more things to share:
* After years of teaching a reframe to work-life balance — which, c’mon, is impossible — Work-Life Chemistry is now a six-week newsletter course ([link removed]) . It costs $50, and will help you discover what drives you, how to protect it and how to evolve with it.
* Check out the 13 veteran print journalists ([link removed]) who were selected for Scripps Journalism Journey Initiative.
* The 2024 Poynter Journalism Prizes are now open for entries ([link removed]) .
* I was so happy to see all these local newsrooms ([link removed]) get well-deserved attention from The New York Times.
* And finally, I wrote my last obit for the Tampa Bay Times ([link removed]) at the end of last year. Due to freelance budget cuts, that work is ending, but I’m not done with obits ([link removed]) , so stay tuned.

That’s it for me. My son got his driver’s license over the holiday break and I’m fine. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. 😬
Kristen
Kristen Hare
Faculty
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])

ADVERTISE ([link removed]) // DONATE ([link removed]) // LEARN ([link removed]) // JOBS ([link removed])
Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here. ([link removed])
[link removed] [link removed] [link removed] [link removed] mailto:[email protected]?subject=Feedback%20for%20Poynter
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
© All rights reserved Poynter Institute 2024
801 Third Street South, St. Petersburg, FL 33701
If you don't want to receive email updates from Poynter, we understand.
You can change your subscription preferences ([link removed]) or unsubscribe from all Poynter emails ([link removed]) .