Why Coping With Burnout Should Be on Every Journalist’s Priority List?
If burnout in journalism is not addressed, the rate of journalists leaving their positions will further grow.
We journalists are usually not keen on talking about how the work we do and the stories we cover affect us. Discussing our own mental health and asking for help is taboo in many newsrooms. It is not easy for a reporter, who is used to being tough when facing difficult situations, to show their vulnerability. We don’t talk about our uncertainties and sense of tiredness, even in situations when our colleagues are also our friends.
Still, I believe that mental health is a huge issue among us, investigative journalists. This career simply does not provide happiness, comfort, or fulfillment, especially in Eastern Europe. I must think long and hard to find a colleague who has found the healthy balance between private life and work, but I can easily name at least half a dozen colleagues who recently quit (or at least took a break from) journalism because of work-related burnout, tired of doing a demanding job that offers little satisfaction.
The absence of this topic from our collective mind is odd because reflecting on the work we do, documenting, and teaching our peers the different journalistic techniques have become a large part of the work we do as investigative journalists.
There are countless conferences, discussions, and workshops on the most varied topics: from using AI in the investigative process to tracking ships, planes, or even waste; or to finding the real people behind social media accounts. Yet, until a month ago, it had been years since last time I participated in a workshop about mental health in the newsroom.
The 2023 Global Investigative Journalism Conference, organized by GIJN last September, offered two such workshops. One was more generic, dealing with stress, trauma, and burnout. The other focused on what newsroom managers can do to ensure that their team is able to cope with the daily challenges they face. Both workshops were conducted by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
The topic has started to also become part of the academic literature about media and journalism. According to one of the most recent studies on the topic, issued last April by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at the University of North Carolina, more than 500 American journalists reported experiencing personal burnout, accounting for 72% of them. Yet, as burnout is considered an individual issue rather than an industry issue, newsrooms tend to ignore its significance, resulting in journalists taking time off or even quitting journalism. This situation needs to change.
As an investigative journalist and the manager of a small investigative newsroom, I realize how difficult it is to find the time and place to listen to our colleagues talking about how they feel. Yet, I know that incorporating such moments into our daily routine is essential.
A good investigative journalist takes years to form, and there are way too few of us. I am afraid that at this moment we are losing journalists at a faster pace than we can form them — and we simply cannot afford this luxury.
Zoltan Sipos is the managing editor of Atlatszo Erdely, a Hungarian-language investigative journalism outlet in Romania. He is also the director of a program focused on financing independent media outlets run by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC).
