I recently attended a really insightful and important #MediaStrong event, a mental health symposium for journalists, at City St George’s, University of London this past week. It was great to see former colleagues Clarissa Ward and Schams Elwazer speaking and Hannah Vaughan Jones hosting.
Here are my top takeaways:
1) Mentally healthy newsrooms make for better journalism and emotionally intelligent storytelling
2) It’s not just the war reporters and field teams that can struggle. Desk-based fact checkers, UGC teams (which often skew younger) are day in day out watching content that can be traumatic
3) Managers often get a bad rap generally but I know from my own experience that it can at times be a lonely, stressful job with high responsibility. How do we better support newsroom managers?
4) Where in organisations does Mental Health sit? It’s got to sit with someone in the business who has influence AND budget
5) Mental health is often seen and talked about through a Western lens. Are your speakers, courses resonating with different cultures?
6) Talking about mental health needs to be normalised
7) Mental health offerings in newsrooms can’t just be giving employees a number to call should they need it. Training needs to be part of onboarding and then regularly held alongside regular check-ins
8) Training cannot be offered as something you have to fit around your day job.
9) As a Certified Coach, I know that mental resilience can be taught and it’s something we also have a personal responsibility to focus on
10) Peer to peer support is really important and those organisations offering that are seeing huge benefits
It was great to see so many journalists and producers from BBC, SkyNews, #CNN, #NBC, #CBS and #AlJazeera coming together on this issue.
Having worked in a busy newsroom, it’s harder than ever for leaders to be able to make events like these, but I would definitely urge more C-suite executives to participate in the future. Leadership from the very top on this issue is vital to see it through. It’s also critical that leadership that reflects the whole work force is there and definitely more women at that level would be helpful.
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