"Drawing on interviews with 10 U.S. student journalists, we introduce an ethics-of-care approach for trauma-informed journalism pedagogy. We express grave concern for mental health in journalism programs, offering an empirical snapshot of students’ traumas and coping strategies. We confirm that st
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udent journalists, like working reporters, are traumatized by professional norms, high demands, poor boundaries, safety concerns, and ethical-professional responsibilities. Participants coped through emotional distancing, saving face, and relying on peers. We offer interventions based on student support needs and changing news values, including faculty affirmation, financial support, counselor support, diversity training, newsroom debriefings, emotional leadership, and reporting protocols." (Abstract)
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"This chapter explores some of the positive strategies employed by South Asian media institutions to enhance workplace happiness and help journalists to cope with stress and traumatic experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Happiness is crucial for media institutions because journalism is one of t
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he most stressful professions. Previous studies have found that the COVID-19 crisis has had a considerable impact on journalism. Hence, it is important to maintain workplace happiness in media institutions, particularly during a crisis like the pandemic." (Abstract)
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"This study examined the effects of online harassment on journalists’ psychological trauma and their intention to leave work. It also investigated whether journalists’ psychological trauma mediates the effects of online harassment on their intention to leave the profession and whether gender mak
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es a difference in that relationship. An online survey of 404 South Korean journalists provided three categories of online harassment that journalists experience: (1) aggressive and abusive expression, (2) disclosure of private information, and (3) cyberstalking and hacking. The findings of this study show that aggressive and abusive expression was the most frequent type of online harassment whereas cyberstalking and hacking was the least frequent. As expected, online harassment was found to be positively associated with journalists’ psychological trauma (PTSD symptoms) and intention to leave work. The results further indicate that journalists’ psychological trauma originating from online harassment frequently resulted in an intention to leave work. Interestingly, journalists’ psychological trauma was a significant mediator in the relationship between psychological trauma levels and intention to leave work for female journalists, but not for male journalists." (Abstract)
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"The study of forced internal displacement (FID) frequently focuses on the personal effects of structural violence. However, the targeted victimization of members of risky occupations is less studied, neglecting the importance of professional factors in mediating people's experiences of displacement
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. Based on 20 in-depth interviews, this study uses a social-ecological approach to explore the challenges and experiences of journalists living under forced internal displacement in Mexico City, analyzing the multiple hardships journalists face in their resettlement processes at macro-structural, meso-professional, and micro-individual levels. Findings show that the most relevant aspects of the journalists’ experiences are family, economic and psychological concerns at the individual level; the partial or total disenfranchisement of journalistic practice, professional demotion and deskilling at the meso-level; and the general distrust of government programs at the structural level. We conclude that displaced journalists, already victimized by occupational violence, become even more vulnerable and suffer from specific profession-related hardships on top of the challenges that usually afflict displaced populations. Journalists suffer from unique and isolated forms of displacement. We call for more studies that explore the professional traits and conditions of victimized members of risky occupations to account for their overall experiences of displacement and resettlement." (Abstract)
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"This research is based on 28 in-depth interviews with Kenya-based journalists who report terrorism. The objective of the research was to recount their lived experiences. The theme of safety of journalists comprised psychological and physical safety of the newspeople, and there were various ways in
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which the psychological and individual safety of the journalists covering terrorism and related events was at risk. The psychological safety included traumatic events leading to sleeplessness and nightmares, loss of memory, and some journalists resorting to alcohol abuse in a bid to cope with the traumatic experiences. These physical safety concerns for some journalists included threats of death by fanatical religious groups, while other participants said that they were threatened with death because of their coverage of terrorism and related activities in Kenya." (Abstract)
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"Attacks on journalists and the media in Brazil have a long history but have become even more problematic through the use of social media, particularly following the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2019. In times of industry restructuring and coronavirus pandemic, the systematic attacks o
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n individual journalists and on the media by Bolsonaro and his associates are posing unprecedented challenges, and are part of a pattern of abuse to suppress media freedom and discredit journalists’ work. This article focuses upon journalists’ abilities to access different types of capital to anticipate, cope with, and create options to overcome perceived threats and generate positive outcomes. This study builds upon the works of Voss (Behemoth-A Journal on Civilisation 1 (3): 39–56, 2008), Obrist, Pfeiffer and Henley (Progress in Development Studies 10 (4): 283–293, 2010) and Hess’ (Communication Theory 23 (2): 112–130, 2013) “mediated social capital” to advance understanding of the nexus amongst risk, vulnerability and social resilience, and examines structural inequalities in and through the media. By employing a mixed-methods approach, we combine the results of a survey and in-depth interviews with high-profile figures of leading newspapers and professional bodies in the country. The findings open up possibilities on how news media’s “mediated social capital” might enhance women journalists’ capacity to move from vulnerability to social resilience, improving their safety." (Abstract)
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"Due to the nature of their jobs, journalists reporting from theaters of war, destruction, and violence are frequently exposed to potentially traumatizing experience. This study explores how journalists go about trauma exposure, how they deal with its emotional fallout, and what support they get in
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the process. In doing so, we use 35 qualitative interviews with conflict journalists working for news media in German-speaking countries, and draw on established theories of trauma exposure, its mental consequences, and ways to cope with them. Findings show that conflict journalists run a significant risk of experiencing trauma, either directly as targets of violence, or indirectly as eye-witnesses and as recipients of narrative accounts and vivid images of human suffering. Respondents noted a glaring lack of organizational support and prevention structure, which they connected to a problematic newsroom culture characterized by sexism, machoism, and a fierce competition." (Abstract)
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"Over a decade ago, the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings erupted in six Arab countries. They were accompanied, initially, by high hopes for democratic transformation and reform (Lynch, 2012). These hopes and aspirations also included widening the margin of freedom of expression in general and press freedo
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m in particular (El Tantawy & Wiest, 2011). However, these Arab Spring countries ultimately suffered from serious challenges which negatively impacted their transition to democratization and political reform, leading to an escalating wave of authoritarianism, which worsened significantly amid the Covid-19 pandemic (Khamis, 2020a, 2020b). This chapter investigates the myriad factors impacting journalistic practices in the Arab world in the post–Arab Spring and post-Covid-19 era, with a special focus on the multiple effects and far-reaching implications on both legacy media and citizen journalism. It pays special attention to the phenomenon of journalistic resistance from the diaspora (Khamis & Fowler, 2020) and the gender-based challenges impacting Arab women journalists, in particular, as a result of these intertwined and complex set of factors (Khamis & El-Ibiary, 2022), Finally, it highlights some of the resistance mechanisms which are deployed by Arab journalists to push back against the multilayered and multifaceted constraints which are imposed on them by their autocratic regimes, politically, economically, legally, and professionally." (Abstract)
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"This paper focuses on the (in)direct tools of governmental bureaucracy used to control journalistic work in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). It calls for understanding media capture not only through structural-level consequences, but also through the methods used to create an environment of inst
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ability and unsafety. To make sense of these processes, and how they are experienced and negotiated by journalists, this paper combines scholarship on the emotional labor of journalism with scholarship on processes of media capture in deeply restrictive environments. The mixed-methods approach aims first to uncover structural conditions of media capture in the KRI through a document analysis of 21 public reports published by the Kurdistan Journalists’ Syndicate (KJS) and the Metro Center for Journalists’ Rights and Advocacy (MC) between 2014 and 2020. Second, it aims to reveal how journalists and editors-in-chief from diverse media organizations manage and negotiate these chronic conditions of precarity and instability, through 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews. The results show multiple strategies that have been developed by journalists and editors to mitigate or acclimate direct and indirect bureaucratic violence (e.g., editorial support, socialization skills and networks, understanding of unspoken and unwritten rules, etc.)." (Abstract)
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"This chapter draws on a discourse analysis of newsroom social media policies, and in-depth interviews with journalists focused on their reactions to the social media policies within the newsrooms in which they have worked, and their recommendations for how those policies should be improved." (Abstr
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act)
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"In 2019, 51 people were killed in terror attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, a city on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand with a population of around 400,000 people. It was the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history and the first terror attack of its kind on home soil
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, attracting extensive international media attention. Given the city’s relative isolation, early coverage was by local media and included local journalism students who had responded to a developing event. This study explores the first-hand experiences of these undergraduate broadcast journalism students who, just a few weeks into a new academic year, covered the news story for national and international media. Using mini focus groups, this descriptive study sheds light on how students with little to no trauma training coped with reporting on such an extreme and unprecedented event and the crucial role soft skills played in guiding their actions." (Abstract)
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"This chapter introduces the psychological science of well-being as applied to the work of journalists. This review links the general psychological literature on health and well-being with the emerging literature about journalists’ well-being to enhance our understanding of journalists’ experien
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ces and highlight the need for research to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and emerging interventions." (Abstract)
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"The authors saw the need to explore the emotional labour experiences of media practitioners owing to the sparse literature on the phenomenon from an African perspective. The study explored how media practitioners explain emotional labour, the factors that predispose them to emotional labour experie
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nces, and the emotions they display in carrying out their daily roles. Adopting a qualitative approach, thirteen (13) media practitioners (including journalists) were sampled using both purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Nine (9) of the participants were male, with most of them being Christians (N=11). It was found that participants’ responses clustered around four (4) themes: generic level meaning, where they described emotional labour as constituting “living a lie” or “intentional pretense”; dimensions of emotional labour, which were identified to be enhancement and suppression. Also, two main predisposing factors to media practitioners’ emotional labour experiences were found: Occupational display culture and feedback/pressure from the public. Media practitioners exhibit both negative and positive emotions as they dispense their duties at work. It is recommended that regulatory bodies and journalist associations advance occupational safety and health standards to boost the psychological health of media personnel through collaborations with psychologists and other mental health professionals. We urge all institutions that train journalists and media practitioners to incorporate psychology and mental health modules in their curricula." (Abstract)
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"This chapter examines the intersection of journalist security and safety with the condition of happiness to proffer solutions at the individual and organizational levels, including vis a vis boundaries, mental models, and security champions, with the aim of contributing to journalistic happiness, s
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afety, and security." (Abstract)
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"GIJN’s comprehensive, 16-chapter Reporter’s Guide to Investigating War Crimes includes expert advice from more than two dozen specialists and journalists, covering everything from the legal aspects of war, attacks on civilians, conflict-related sexual violence, environmental crimes, banned weap
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ons, genocide, forced disappearances, archiving evidence, open source research, military command structures, tracing war criminals, documenting with photo and video, physical and digital security best practices, and self-care for covering traumatic events." (https://gijn.org)
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"This study aims to identify the challenges of women journalists in Afghanistan and their impact on the intention to leave the job. To achieve the objectives of this study, a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) has been used. In the qualitative section, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted
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with female journalists in Afghanistan using purposive sampling. The interview data were analyzed using “NVivo 12.” In the quantitative section, Maslach’s burnout theory was integrated with job demands, family job conflict, organizational support, and society job conflict scales as influential factors on the intention to leave the job. Quota sampling was used to send an online questionnaire to 350 female journalists in Afghanistan. As a result, 183 questionnaires were obtained, of which 157 were completed. Pearson correlation coefficients and multilinear regression tests with 95% confidence level (P*<*0.05) were used to analyze the data using “SPSS 25.” Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, family job conflict, society job conflict, and intention to leave the job are all found to have a positive and significant relationship in this study. In contrast, this study found a significant negative relationship between the perception of organizational support and the intention to leave the job." (Abstract)
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"The article outlines an evidence-informed approach for enhancing resilience, one of the key personal resources in labor, and explores the viability of this training for increasing journalists’ ability to manage everyday work-related stressors. The suggested pedagogy is in the form of a microinter
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vention, informed by literature on psychological capital and primary research based on interviews with British journalists. The test of concept is based on 13 workshops carried out with journalism trainees and professionals. The postworkshop survey (n = 80) suggests that the proposed pedagogy has the potential to contribute to development of participants’ resilience as well as their wider psychological capital." (Abstract)
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"Literature notes that most journalists will witness trauma and human suffering during the course of their careers, yet journalism education is lagging behind in preparing students to cope with the effects of exposure to traumatic events. This paper examines the attitudes of journalism educators/tra
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iners toward trauma literacy through a questionnaire survey of 119 journalism educators globally. The findings show that a high percentage of educators have a good understanding of the risks that arise from exposure to critical and potentially traumatizing events but there are some barriers to teaching trauma including lack of knowledge/confidence, resources, time, and teaching materials." (Abstract)
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"This chapter explores what educators can do to help students cope with trauma that they are likely to experience during their studies and in their future practice." (Abstract)
"Working in a conflict-ridden region, journalists in the Middle East have always struggled to report fairly and accurately while keeping in mind the power structures in their countries. For these journalists, practicing journalism in mostly authoritative governments has meant facing additional hurdl
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es fellow journalists in democratic societies rarely experience. Among these are low levels of professionalism, poor education, and lack of proper training, which, combined with political parallelism in an omnipresent governmental style of ruling, have left journalists with little wiggle room to perform their journalistic duties well. In the past decade, these struggles have been further exacerbated by the various episodes of conflict, political turmoil, and war, putting journalists under immediate danger. Besides the physical dangers of reporting in war zones, most journalists in the Arab region are not equipped with proper training or mental health issues, thus increasing their chances at developing PTSD. This chapter seeks to outline the various aspects of journalistic practices in conflict zones, focusing on conflict reporting and foreign correspondence in the Middle East, as well as highlight the numerous obstacles that threaten journalists’ safety not only in war zones but also in daily reporting on politics and public affairs. To accomplish this, the author approaches the topic from a media systems perspective that takes into account the various influences that impact journalistic practices of conflict reporting in the region." (Abstract)
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