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 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.
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