Supporting mental wellbeing in the newsroom

Charlotte Pion: What can be done to improve mental health support for journalists in newsroom?

Fran Unsworth: I think that the subject has come a long way since I first started in journalism and first started at the BBC, when mental health in journalism wasn’t really much on the agenda at all. Safety itself wasn’t really on the agenda until the 1990s but then it became about physical safety and it was about making sure that journalists in the field had the right equipment. But after quite a number of them came back from working in war zones  with a high degree of PTSD, then news organisations started to think about how they could support their staff through that kind of trauma.

But then I think the industry moved on to different environments where there were far more pictures that people were seeing in newsrooms, because of the growth of social media video, sharing sites. … And it was realised that actually it wasn’t just journalists in the field that needed support. It was people in newsrooms themselves who were subject to quite a lot of material which could be very, very traumatising. It was at that point, and it was only fairly recent, that news organisations started to think about what they could do to support all journalists.

Read more: Addressing journalists’ mental wellbeing: Setting peer support in newsrooms

Newsrooms are very pressurised environments, particularly in broadcast because you’re meeting deadlines, there’s never enough time, there’s never enough stuff to do things. … There is an adrenaline surge every day, and of course some people like that, but it does carry its own kind of pressures and trauma.

So, what can newsroom do to support their journalists? I think it’s about recognising all these challenges in the workplace and providing a space where people can talk about it, and not be seen as being weak if they talk about it. It’s also about encouraging news organisations to put measures in to help people because if they don’t do that, they’re going to lose their staff to other jobs and then you’ve got to retrain a whole load of new ones. In a way, there is an economic justification for news organisations as to why they should be doing this.

CP: How can this conversation be created or improved between the newsrooms and the management?

FU: It might not come about directly between managers and their staff, but it might be about creating some other environment which is a safe space for staff to talk to somebody or each other, to which then actually managers can be alerted to. Because people don’t always want to tell their managers what’s going on in their minds or about how they are feeling about certain things because they will be anxious that it would affect their career in some kind of way. That is one of the issues here which is that people need to be able to talk about it. They might not be able to talk about it to their managers, but managers also need to be able to take it seriously as well.

“There are quite a lot of measures that news organisations can think about on a practical basis to protect their staff from this. I do think they need to be thinking about it because it will put people off going into the jobs which is not something that we want.”

CP: The role of managers has its own set of pressures and challenges, what form of support can be put in place for higher positions in the newsrooms?

FU: I always think managers get a bit of a bad rap, particularly middle managers. They’re the intermediary between the sort of operational side and the strategic side. And they are there to tell their bosses what can and can’t work. And their bosses don’t always want to hear that. They’re there to pass on, lower down the organisation, things that their teams might not want to hear or do. So, they can get quite squeezed in the middle.

People have a habit of transferring stress. The stress tends to be passed down because you’re afraid of expressing your stress upwards. So middle managers, therefore, need to be given the space that they can have honest conversations to with their own bosses. That is something which I think organisations also need to work on.

CP: With new technologies coming up, other forms of pressure are appearing. What can be done to better address the trauma that it can bring to journalists and in the newsroom?

FU: I think this is almost the new frontier, as it were, that journalists and news organisations need to be thinking about. Because there’s no doubt about it that we’re living in a much, much more polarised world than we were a few years ago, where people hold very, very strongly held opinions. People tend to default to their own echo chambers rather than rely on established news organisations for their information and they take it out on people with a public profile quite often. And some of the hate speech that our journalists have to put up with is quite horrific.