Happiness in Journalism

Journalists around the globe face numerous stressors related to their work, including demanding circumstances and experiencing a lack of reciprocity on the job. They often give much and receive little in return while public trust, and institutional support (and recognition) of and for journalists is absent. Many journalists, especially women, people of color or practitioners with minority backgrounds, experience harassment, exhaustion, and trauma at work. Journalists are vulnerable to trauma because of the news tendency to focus on what goes wrong in society, and in people’s lives. With 20+ contributions from scholars globally, this book argues that happiness and well-being is a fundamental step towards re-imagining journalism work and labor, because a happy worker in the full and richest sense of the concept is a better worker when it comes to resilience, efficacy, and one’s ability to do good work.