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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. These have a major impact on the mental health and happiness of reporters and editors. Though not new, problematic aspects of what working in the media is like have been linked to demands for journalists to engage on social media platforms, document and remedy increased political polarization while suffering attempts to vilify the press, the rapid rise of atypical work, and the pressures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This book argues that happiness 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.
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Selected solutions for educators, journalists, and newsrooms from the book's authors
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