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The kids of my neighborhood have been busy. (Photos by Kristen Hare/Poynter)
Every weekday, I open a document on my computer and add layoffs, furloughs and closures to this list
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. Every day, I get emails with more. And every single day, I hear from someone who says something like this:
“Thanks for the work that you're doing.”
“Thank you for spotlighting this.”
“...That is grim reading. But I write to say thanks for your work.”
I don’t feel like I deserve that at all.
You’ve probably experienced secondary trauma before. I usually get it third-hand. I felt it most after spending a day with the Orlando Sentinel newsroom as they covered the Pulse Nightclub shooting
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. Editors put me in an empty office, and Sentinel journalists stopped by when they got a free moment and told me about their work. Some of them cried. I am a crier. But I did not, because it felt like my responsibility to keep it together for them.
When friends and family asked if I was OK, I realized I probably shouldn’t be, but I was in a safe office listening to stories while these journalists were covering something horrific. I couldn’t make space for my own stuff.
It took weeks to thaw out after that.
In writing obituaries
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for the Tampa Bay Times last year, I broke down a lot, mostly off the phone or out of someone’s kitchen, but that grief felt shared and feeling the loss I was reporting on seemed appropriate, even if it was just tears between me and my keyboard.
Now, when people ask if I’m OK, I realize I’m back in third-hand trauma mode. The grief I feel for journalists, newsrooms and the communities that need them is hard to pierce for a lot of reasons. I still have a job. Poynter hasn’t had layoffs. And I have emails to respond to and a list to update (and kids to pretend to homeschool.) That list is awful. It keeps growing. But it feels like my responsibility to keep it together.
Random emails from people I don’t know, check-ins from people I do and a very clear purpose help.
I realized the role this was serving to puncture the numbness this week when I talked with Mike Sherman. Mike, a respected editor, was laid off from the Tampa Bay Times last month. When former colleagues and friends in Oklahoma found out, they approached him with a gig. Now, he’s editing this project that’s putting journalists back to work in Oklahoma
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, one story at a time.
My notes are messy, so I’m paraphrasing, but Mike said this:
My own sense is we’re carried along in these tough times of lost jobs and furloughs by the people who’ve dodged those big raindrops this time.
That’s right.
We’re helping each other however we can. Sharing work, subscribing, supporting furlough funds, checking in, finding work, all of it matters. Even when it’s small.
I see this in the work of Report for America
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, which is sending 225 journalists into local newsrooms this summer. I see it in the way The Boston Globe expressed solidarity with its city
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on the day the Boston Marathon didn’t happen. I see this in the humor and candor
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other working parents offered about life in quarantine. I see it in universities shifting
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to help cover the news, in recognition of the work of our colleagues
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, in financial support from readers
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and outside of the news world, how teachers are adapting again and again for our kids
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Thank you, for subscribing, for reading, for responding now and then, for sharing what you’re working on.
I have no idea when I’ll stop updating the layoffs list. But we’ll carry each other through.
Kristen
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