By Catherine Komp, NC Local News Workshop engagement director
As many continue to process the election results, some journalists are reflecting on the purpose and the value of their work: does my reporting matter? Is it reaching people? Do I have the stamina to keep doing this?
As I was seeing these questions surface, I came across a post from Sam Ragland, vice president of Journalism Programs at the American Press Institute. Sam captures an important reality about this moment: that journalists, at any level of newsroom hierarchy, might not know what they need right now. That the stress can feel debilitating, but there are concrete steps to take to begin moving forward.
“None of us who care about community and have taken up the display of that care through our work and commitment to journalism are immune to the stress that comes with that commitment — nor are we invincible to the hazards of this job,” wrote Ragland. “It is never a good time to maintain the status quo of ‘thick skin’ and ‘no crying in the newsroom.’ It is always a good time to move from empathy to compassion — that is, from acknowledging what someone feels to acting on their behalf.”
Sam shared a collection of ideas from journalists who’ve participated in API’s “Beyond Stress” workshops, encouraging reporters, news leaders, publishers and funders to spend time with the slides to understand what journalists need and what actions can shore them up and build resilience in newsrooms for the months and years ahead.
“[Newsrooms] have a front row seat to what therapists and psychologists and neuroscientists would call vicarious resilience. It’s a concept that I love.” said Ragland. “I love it because we too often focus on who’s leaving the industry, who’s burned out, what’s wrong with us, right? We focus a lot on the trauma and how it gets on you and it sticks. But studies have found that trauma isn’t the only thing that sticks to you, but that resilience can stick to you as well.”
I had the opportunity to chat with Sam about this moment and how to shift your lens from uncertainty to purpose. Sam lays out how to recognize value in your work, reinvent newsroom culture and move from serving news feeds and algorithms to building bridges within communities.
NC Local: North Carolina news organizations have done really impressive work the last several months, covering Helene, reimagining election coverage with community agendas, reverse town halls, and audience-informed voter guides. Following the election, some are asking: is what I’m doing reaching people? Does my work matter? Is the stress of being a journalist worth it? How would you respond to someone asking these questions?
Sam Ragland: These are questions that I hear all the time, and that may be helpful and maybe it isn’t, but I’ve been coaching journalists and newsleaders for years. Many here in the States, but definitely globally as well. And when it comes to the relationship that journalists have with their work, this question of “Does it even matter anymore?” “Is the stress and the pay even worth it anymore?” It comes up pretty regularly, more so now than ever before.
One of the most important things that I try to do when I coach journalists in that headspace is to take a beat and help them take a step back to reflect on the quality of their work. One of the number one questions that I asked through the pandemic when I was doing trauma training, was about a story that brought you joy and which one came to mind first.
I’ve trained newsrooms of hundreds, newsrooms of teens, and it was very hard for journalists, no matter how long they’ve been in the industry, no matter what type of newsroom they were in, no matter if they were calling in from North Carolina, or California, or South Africa, they had a really hard time pinpointing the story that brought them joy.
And that is a part of the problem, right? That when you are questioning if what you’re doing matters anymore, you need to take a step back, and take stock of the things that have happened and of the things that you have done. Newsrooms are bad at this, even though they have a front row seat to what therapists and psychologists and neuroscientists would call vicarious resilience.
It’s a concept that I love. I love it because we too often focus on who’s leaving the industry, who’s burned out, what’s wrong with us, right? We focus a lot on the trauma and how it gets on you and it sticks. But studies have found that trauma isn’t the only thing that sticks to you, but that resilience can stick to you as well.
And you can vicariously live through the resilience of someone else and that can refill your reservoir, to kind of hunker down and get through this amount of stress and purpose questioning, right? But because we are so focused on the next headline, the next deadline, the next print product, whatever the case is, the nature of the job doesn’t allow us the time or the opportunity to take a beat and reflect in a way that can empower and refill our resilience, remind us actually of our purpose.
And so when I coach journalists, it always goes back to that. If you’re questioning your purpose, and I know, having been in the newsroom, these are my favorite people and we desperately need them doing this exact work. But we, as newsleaders, aren’t often poised or eloquent enough, which is strange because our main source of currency is storytelling and yet we let down our internal communities, the journalists that are reporting for us, when we aren’t telling the right stories about the work. and so that’s my advice.
My advice is journalists are some of the most resilient people in the working world. And they are resilient because they’re called to this work for a purpose. They are resilient because they believe that words have real power to drive real change. But, they don’t often bask in that in a way that can help them realign with their purpose or just catch it again.
NC Local: So finding stories to cover about resiliency and joy leads to this vicarious resilience?
Sam Ragland: Yes, that’s exactly right. I always tell a story about my grandma Rosa, Doll was her nickname. And I just remember how crippling her arthritis was before she passed away. I also remember how whenever it was getting the best of her, she would muster up, wherever it came from, and she would go tend to her garden. She had roses and she had sunflowers and she had tulips and she had the prettiest yard in Cincinnati, no doubt, right? And I think about the resilience in her hands, and I can activate that sense of self because of this woman.
And journalists have a front row seat to the resilience of humanity, the resilience of love, the resilience of family. But if we downgrade our access and when I say downgrade, I mean if we are only talking about that access because it turned a donor, or it turned a digital start, or it turned a page view, or it went viral, then we really aren’t activating the access that we have to really stay truly married to the purpose of being a journalist and married in a way that’s actually healthy. It doesn’t have to be an unhealthy relationship with work. It can be very healthy.
Especially when you’re covering the storm, when you are a part of the story, because your community, your neighborhood, are as impacted. And then on top of that, you layer anything that was still wrestling underneath the surface from the post pandemic and then the presidential election on top of that and then what does 2025 even look like? There’s a lot to worry us and there’s a lot to make us question the work. But there’s also a lot that would make us double down if we can just make space to have those conversations and to really focus on that, versus everything else. It’s tough. It’s tough, but it’s necessary.
NC Local: You shared an extremely helpful post on LinkedIn and started it by saying: “This week, journalists may not know what they need. They may not know next week either, and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter where you sit in the newsroom, what level of the hierarchy you occupy. When the weeks are difficult, it can be even more difficult to know what kind of support you need.”
First, thank you for saying that — I think it’s a really important reminder that it’s okay if we don’t know what questions to ask, or what answers to provide.
You then share some guidance from API’s “Beyond Stress” workshops — where you’ve collected responses from practicing journalists across newsrooms and roles, identities and experience to the questions: How might I need support now? How might I need support later?
Sam Ragland: It’s amazing what you get when it’s anonymous. It’s a Google deck. Nobody is assigned to anything besides an animal that we’ve never heard of before. And I encourage the room not to lie to themselves, that it’s okay to lie to me and you may never see me again, but this interaction, and these prompts are specifically for you. And so if you’re going to show up, this is the 60 minutes to do it.
Because a lot of journalists in the feedback to the “Beyond Stress” workshops will respond and say, “I didn’t even know that that’s what I needed, I didn’t even know how long it’s been since I was thriving, or until I scrolled through and upvoted other people’s squares, that I knew, I’m not alone, I am really barely surviving.”
The honesty is really, really important and it’s remarkable how people show up when they realize that all you know about them is that they’re an anonymous cow. It’s incredible.
NC Local: What did you hear from journalists about what they need, and how could their managers and news publishers be responsive?
Sam Ragland: This is a training we’ve been doing for two years, so I have hundreds of these. You see things in there that you expect: people need rest, they need more boundaries, they need respect of their boundaries. But then you also see things in there that are a little bit more surprising, like where did better mentoring come from? Why would someone have written that the support that they need actually comes by way of another person?
You saw things in there about structured downtime. This isn’t structured downtime when you’re off the clock supposed to be living your life. This is structured downtime when you are on the clock working the job. And what does that actually mean for a journalist, for a news leader? To know that they have protected time to do the critical thinking, the self discovery, the personal learning necessary to be even more impactful in their job. It’s rare, but structured is interesting there, right?
Because it’s not just any kind of downtime, but it’s like downtime with accountability. It’s downtime with guardrails. How do we make room for that in the everyday workflow when we’re always on, when everybody has slack on their phone, when you’re wearing your Apple watch, and so you’re getting Slack there, when you self distract constantly within an hour to check email and to check messages and then to go back to this thing.
We are a people divided in so many directions and in some ways I think our mental capacity is in ruins, right? Because we are doing a thing and then we are interrupted to do another thing and then we’re doing a thing and then we self distract to do another thing.
And so you can see through the way that people are communicating the support that they need. They need meetings with agendas. They need to know why they got to show up. Why am I here? What do you need from me? That is going to help me mentally. So instead of me reeling around, trying to tell my own story, to fill in the blanks, to show up for the meeting to be something different, right?
We’re talking about how you can just be a caring person at work. And I understand that there are people who love to live in the clouds. but when it comes to the hazards of being a journalist, when it comes to the closing year that we have had, and that your journalists in North Carolina specifically have had, the more guardrails, newsleaders and station owners can create for their people, the better, right?
We’re at a point where most folks don’t want a blank canvas. They want to know that they are on a road and that the road is taking them in the right direction. And so in the same way that our goal for journalism and for our communities, most hit by Helene, most hit by any devastating event, our goal is to give them the best, most clear information that we can find, that we can verify that will enable them to make the best, right decision for them or for their families.
Likewise, internally, our newsleaders and editors, our line editors, our publishers, our executive directors need to be thinking about what my people need to make the best decisions for them. Do they need a recommitment of one on one time with their manager? Many of them probably do, and that one on one time should likely be spent not talking about the election, not talking about Helene, but instead future casting what is to come. Because when you can pinpoint where you’re headed in the future, you can start to ward off burnout because your mind is starting to understand that where you are today isn’t where you will be in the future. To not do that means that mentally you start thinking, am I stuck? Is this what it’s going to always be? When will there ever be an end?
There’s so much in there and there are things that cannot be resolved immediately. We saw in there that people wanted to not be the only person on a beat. They need more bodies in the room. We all need more bodies in the room. A pushback to that, however, is that to get a body in the room in the culture that does not sustain you means that there is just another person who is operating from a fixed mindset of do, do, do, yes, yes, yes, on, on, on. And then y’all gonna be miserable together, right?
So what types of things can we start to do now that will enable our people to breathe, and to flourish, and if we can get some of those things right now, then you can start to ask these questions about, can we shift workload? Can we share workload? Is there a restructure in our midst that focuses on different topics, which increases bodies on a beat or whatever the case might be, right? But so often we think that’s the number one best solution, and I hear it, but also I read about our industry as you do too. How many techies at the New York Times are striking, right? And you got a local newsroom dying to have that many people. Why are they striking, right? And so we got to talk about culture, we got to talk about policy, we need to talk about behavior too. There are small things in there that can be done immediately, and then there are other things that take a little more time.
NC Local: This makes me think about the “Stop Doing” framework as a really good place to start, to make a little bit more space for structured downtime and people not feeling pushed to their limits.
Sam Ragland: And when you do something like “Stop Doing,” for everyone, then you are showing people and giving them permission to actually do it right. I can individually work on Stop Doing and I can see I have this list, but if I am not psychologically safe enough in my organization to admit to leadership that there are things on my plate not serving our goal, then Stop Doing is more disempowering than it is empowering.
However, when you do Stop Doing across an entire organization, when you decide that there have to be things on our plate no longer serving our mission and no longer serving our community, gather all of them, from everybody across all of their vantage points, and you’re going to end up with a pretty incredible list.
And not only that, but if I am seeing that the executive editor is going to stop doing something and I’m just like a first year, how much more likely am I to be okay to stop doing something? Because even the boss and the boss’s boss has said there are things even on my plate. We are all doing this together. We are going to “Stop Doing” together. How energizing is that for an entire newsroom? It’s incredible.
NC Local: Have you seen news organizations be responsive to what comes out in these workshops and what have they done to make things better?
Sam Ragland: There are a ton of newsrooms doing really, really great work. Tara Francis Chan is running The Appeal. They have written all about their community wellbeing policies and their people first newsroom strategies, like no meeting days. I can’t tell you how many newsrooms I have trained and coached who are like, “We are smothered under the meetings that we have here.” And implementing something as small as a no meeting day, whether it’s at the organizational level or at the team level. Because here’s what I have learned from running a team in the newsroom: a team can operate with a different culture than the rest of the newsroom. And that is up to the leader of that team and up to the team members themselves to decide that they want to operate and be different. So no meeting days is something that I have seen.
I have seen four day work weeks that are working exceptionally well, and those are four day work weeks at 35 hours a week, not 40, so not trying to stuff 40 hours in a week. That has worked for Prism.
I’ve also seen things that you want them to work in theory and in practice, but old habits die hard, right? For example, Capital B has incredible work life policy, leave and care policy, all of these different things. They are doing really, really great on the policy side.
And they’re doing great on the participation side, but they struggle, right? If these policies are new to you, there’s also a part of you that’s kind of questioning, if I take advantage of this time, what does that mean for me? Does it stall me out? Does it stunt what I’m doing? Are people noticing? And am I being like dinged in their mind?
And so there’s all of this kind of workplace psychology that we both picked up from the workplace, but we’ve also just brought along with us. We have historical markers from the families that raised us, from the way that we have shown up in school, to the way that we’re showing up at work.
Having a manager that prioritizes people for some of us isn’t enough. We got to do some personal, private, deep work to wrestle down our relationship with work and the way we assign ourselves value. And we need to redefine and change our perspective in order for us to show up to a boss like Tara Francis Chan, like Scott Blanchard, who was at WITF until recently. Oh my God, chef’s kiss of an exceptional leader, really wanting to know: is the work that we’re doing and the culture that we have sustainable for the future of our community? For the future of our community! He’s not just thinking about the future of news. He’s thinking if we’re not creating a culture that is sustainable for our journalists, then our community isn’t being covered.
What’s bigger than journalism, right? Cause what happens when you have a healthy bottom line but you’ve got such a stank culture that nobody wants to work there? So now you got profit, but you don’t have people. And that can happen.
Glenn Berkins, who is over there in Charlotte at QCity Metro, is doing incredible well being practices, belonging, and inclusion practices for his very young newsroom. I’m thinking about the power of praise and Priska Neely and the work that she has done at the Gulf States Newsroom and really, really deciding that we will no longer be a team who only receives corrective or critical feedback. Instead, we will also get really specific, really strategic about what we’re doing right.
And the power of praise in a newsroom that goes beyond— forgive me for the shade, but I was in a newsroom where I felt like only the investigative team was ever being celebrated. And I respect that they’re doing hard work. And also, there are all of these other people making inroads whose work is being missed, or you’re just hearing “good work,” which isn’t specific enough for anybody to grow to do more good work, right? So feedback is specific. Praise is general.
One of the most important things a newsroom can do for the psyche and morale of their teams is get specific in the way you praise them. And guess what? That’s free. Doesn’t cost a dime. You don’t have to get a subscription to Headspace for that. You can just decide in the moment that you notice the behavior, that you notice the thing, in the one on ones, in the feedback, in the quarterly report, you can activate praise for free. And it does a lot. It does a lot when it’s genuine, when it comes from a real place and when it’s specific.
NC Local: For news and information organizations run by and for immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ — there are heightened concerns about the months and years ahead. What role can the larger news and information ecosystem play in supporting these organizations, especially anticipating the large number of policy changes from the Trump administration that will affect local communities? How should newsrooms address their need to serve communities with as much information as possible, without breaking themselves during the process.
Sam Ragland: The first thing I think about is just modeling the behavior you want and need to see. One of the things that has happened to us in the local news industry, both from the first Trump administration and then the pandemic, was that we lowered our bar to what breaking news is, post those two big life events. And that it feels like if we’re not careful, we will treat the next administration like four years of breaking news, and that’s not actually sustainable. Our bodies and our minds were not built to sustain four years.
And so for the local news ecosystem, it is important to model the things that you need to maintain a healthy relationship with work, healthy relationship with family, and healthy relationship with community. One of the ways that newsrooms can do this and that journalism support organizations like y’all and like us here at API can do, is really one, remind people that this does not have to be a breaking news event. Two, remind people that journalists are no longer on a soapbox dictating what is important to their community, but the community itself knows what they want to know and we should be responsive to that. We should be responsive to that beyond the byline. There are some roles in the newsroom that absolutely step in front of their byline. Their faces are known, they are a commodity within their community, people know that that’s the journalist that they can go to.
Most of us, however, are still very much behind the byline. So understanding the power of connection and the convening power of local news as a community pillar and institution will be important for the next four years.
What are the skills that you need in order to do the new job really, really well? You need to know how to navigate conflict in real time. You need to know how to convene people and disarm them. How do you make sure they all belong? You need to know not just how to ask the questions to get your story, but you need to know how to ask the questions, hear the answers and connect them to the other questions, right? And so you are a connector and facilitator of larger conversations than what can be contained under the headline of one story. You got to get good. You got to get good at showing up in front of your byline.
The other thing that makes this mission critical for just the way we show up and the way we are able to show up for our communities is that this idea of connection, which seems so elementary. Like, we’re not on the playground asking some stranger to be our friend. And yet, neuroscientists have studied trauma in the brains of people, and what they have found is that connection itself, true connection, the quality, not the quantity, the quality of the connections you make and that you engage with has the power to counterbalance adversity, community conflict, burnout, chronic stress, violence, impacts of trauma.
And our transformational, relational connections have decreased because of the pandemic. Most of our work is purely transactional. What I’m talking about may not create a donor immediately. What I’m talking about may not create an article for your website immediately. But it will shore you up. It will remind you why you’re doing this work. It will refill your resilience bank. It will connect you with people in a way that enables you to push forward. And down the road, it will create relationships strong enough that when there is the right need and the right call to action for that relationship, they will be responsive.
I think journalists have an opportunity to really be the bridge. And I don’t think that they’ve ever looked at themselves truly as a bridge between worlds, across worlds. We have an incredible opportunity to go beyond the news feed, beyond the algorithms, into people’s real lives. And that will impact them and it will impact us for net positive, I believe.
Heading into the end of the year and opening up into a brand new year, we have an opportunity to question the way that we do the work. We have an opportunity to change our impact metrics to make them more people sustainable. When you start to rethink the way you do the work, and when you rethink expectations of the work, and then you rethink how you measure those expectations, you find yourself with a really great opportunity to tell a really impactful story.
NC Local: One last question before we wrap up, what is API planning for 2025 to help newsrooms transform their work?
Sam Ragland: We’ve been thinking about 2025 for a while. One of the first things that we’ll do is we’ll continue our experiment funds, which is our micro grant program. Those are typically directly related in some way to our local new summits. We’ll have three local new summits next year. One on local identity and sustainability, which we find really, really important. We have a psychologist who specializes in the study of awe, and how you can really have more awe-inspiring experiences when you are nostalgic, and when you are remembering things with people who are not like you.
We’ll have one on civic discourse across generations, another really important topic, especially as we’re thinking about news leaders managing the next generation of journalists. So we’ve got a lot of things going on and we’ll continue to offer lots of free training, including the ones that you saw from those slides. Those are always offered in May for mental health awareness month. We’ll have one on Beyond Stress and one on trauma informed leadership next year.
Resources & related reading:
➡️ On resilience (and what failure can teach us)
➡️ On leadership and mental health
