Burnout has become commonplace in the already stressful and overwhelming field of journalism. The phenomena can cause journalists to lose their drive. But can burnout be addressed? Will it?
In this podcast, student journalist Zach Bradshaw listens to stories from three journalists and speaks with an expert on burnout to better understand burnout, what we can do to curb it and whether a future without burnout is possible.
Zach Bradshaw: Allow me to tell you what my typical day schedule is. I wake up at 8am. Usually to text from a coworker needing some tasks or write up to be done. I head into the newsroom for my 9 a.m. meeting. And then I’m making calls and researching sources for the three stories that I’m juggling that day. I’m given a lunch at noon, but I usually fill the time by working on projects for my sociology classes. Then it’s back to work on writing stories until 5 p.m. I produced my weekly half hour radio show, then scurry along to my social media internship until 9 p.m.
And that’s on a lighter day.
Hi, I’m Zack Bradshaw, a 20-year-old student journalist at Arizona State University. I love journalism. I’m the news director at Blaze Radio, the nation’s No. 1 college radio station. I worked part time at the Arizona Republic, a division of USA Today. And I’m on the board of directors at my school’s association of LGBTQ+ journalists.
I really love what I do. Having a job shining a light on the voices that need to be heard means a lot to me. And at a time when quality journalists are needed now more than ever, I’m proud to know that I’m the next wave of talent journalists in the industry.
But here’s the thing. I’m not sure I’m going to make it in that industry. Because though I’ve barely started, I’m experiencing a very familiar foe that is becoming a kind of epidemic for journalists worldwide.
I’m feeling burnt out.
And I’m…not alone.
Linda Pattillo: You are simply tired.
Deontay Morris: You know dreading certain tasks,
Pattillo: feeling ineffective
Sammy Gibbons: having a harder time feeling motivated, you too may feel overwhelmed.
Pattilo: No matter how hard I try, it’s just not working.
ZB: Journalism is in danger. Not just from outside actors threatening freedom of speech and the work we do, but from the work itself. In a June 2023 survey by the Poynter Institute 70% of local journalists in a study of over 500 participants reported experiencing work burnout.
Journalism can have some dark days when you’re feeling burnt out. For me, there are still days where I’m feeling so overwhelmed with the amount of items on my to do list, that I end up giving each one about half the attention it deserves.
It feels like I’m always trying to work towards something greater. But I also never reach what that greater truly is. I feel hopeless, confused, lost and simply at the end of my rope with work. It ultimately tanks my competence as a journalist because I begin to think that I cannot achieve in the profession.
To gain insight on burnout, I spoke with Linda Pattillo, Deputy Managing Editor at Scripps News.
Pattillo has worked at Scripps for two years. And before that she was an ABC News correspondent. She has reported on conflict in London, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and the Middle East. And she said she has faced burnout multiple times in her career.
Pattillo: I think my worst burnout experiences have come with what I call re-entry; it’s coming off of a huge story. When I covered the Gulf War for ABC News, I was the only female TV reporter with the combat pool and spent six weeks with the Marines. It was an incredibly difficult, challenging and rewarding story as a journalist, and especially at the time as a female journalist, because we didn’t get those kinds of opportunities. Then, when I returned to the United States, it was draining to suddenly not have that story, not have the combat pool not have every day waking up with the U.S. Marines covering a war. And in the process, I could not find any stories that I felt reignited my passion as a reporter. And it took me a couple of weeks to really get my groove back in that I thought was a case of burnout.
ZB: But it’s not just veteran journalists like Linda that are experiencing burnout. Journalists, even at a young age, are feeling the effects. Just as Sandy Givens, a New York-based reporter who’s worked for USA Today for over four years.
Gibbons: I think just feeling absolutely exhausted feeling. I was like, I need to quit immediately. I can’t do this. I can’t serve my readers. I feel like I can’t do this job anymore. I feel like I need to take a nap and sleep for many days. Truly feeling physically and mentally exhausted.
ZB: Pattilo and Gibbons are holding on, but for some journalists, the burnout can prove to be too much. This was the case for Deontay Morris. When he graduated from Howard University, Morris was excited to begin a career in sports journalism. Within a few years, he had his dream job as a news researcher at ESPN. But it wasn’t long until that dream became a nightmare.
Morris: Yes. I did feel like I did burn out of journalism, Zack. Mainly because like I was alluding to earlier, it’s a constant cycle. I’ve worked mainly in sports journalism, so it’s a bit better. The cycles are based around a sports calendar, for example, so you can anticipate the crescendos and when the peaks and valleys of the year will be. But I find I started to find it very unfulfilling at times. It became like robotic. I knew what I needed to do every day.
ZB: Burnout is affecting journalism at every level, pressuring veterans and young journalists alike. And in cases like Deontay, pushing journalists out of the industry altogether.
But does it have to be this way?
To learn more about the psychology of journalistic burnout, I spoke with Christina Maslach, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Maslach earned her PhD in 1971, and just released her book titled, “The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs.”
Maslach has concluded the burnout is three things, A) fatigue or exhaustion due to high amounts of stress, B) pulling away from work and becoming cynical about it, and C) losing self confidence in one’s work and thinking they’re not able to do it.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that burnout can be mentally and physically destructive.
Christina Maslach: People are not meant to be stressed out chronically all the time. The body begins to go. The mind because to go. We know this from years and years and years of research on stress and coping that stress is good to help you in these certain situations, but you have to be able to recover so that you don’t have this wear and tear on who you are, which will cause later health problems, disrupt your personal relationships, family, community, whatever. There’s just a lot of associated bad baggage that comes along with being unable to really recover from when you have to go all out and do more than you can.
ZB: Maslach argues that journalists shouldn’t personally take the blame for feeling burnt out.
Maslach: The question to be really asking is not who is burning out? But why? And what’s happening here? Remember, there are chronic job stressors that, in the words of World Health Organization, have not been successfully managed by anybody— managers, CEOs, individual employees, teams, whatever.
The optimistic note in there is it could be better managed. What is going on that is leading people to go into burnout, go into this stress response, and so forth? If you’re going to do anything about it, it’s not just about helping the people be stronger. This is about figuring out the chronic stressors. What can we do to alleviate them, modify them, make them less frequent so that we prevent people from having burnout rather than saying, you are burned out, what do we do with you?
ZB: Maslach believes that there are unhealthy misconceptions applied to burnout that make it seem avoidable.
Maslach: The other mantra is if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen, which is saying if it’s too much, it’s your problem. You’re gonna have to figure it out, and if you can’t, you are going to have to leave. Well, you know? The kitchen actually can change. The kitchen could be made less hot, or have better ventilation or we could come up with a better way of treating each other in the kitchen so there’s less harassment and discrimination.
ZB: Drawing from the information we learned. I think it’s important that journalists understand they’re not solely responsible for burnout, and they should look toward the structure in management of their jobs to help them avoid psychological stress.
I also believe journalists themselves must find a balance of the work they can handle, and not overload themselves with too much. I found Linda Pattillo’s jar exercise particularly helpful in deciding how to divide work.
Pattillo: Setting priorities and figuring out what truly is the most meaningful thing to you can prevent burnout. The exercise is one of taking a large jar and on the table in front of you are four big rocks, a pile of sand and a pile of pebbles. Most people when asked to fill the jar will put the sand in the bottom and then the pebbles. And suddenly, when they don’t have time to fit the four rocks into the jar, dump the jar out and instead, put the four rocks in first and fit all the sand and the pebbles in around it that you can. They may not all fit. But what you have in there are the four rocks which were the four things that meant the most to you.
ZB: At just 20 years of age, I know that I’m learning and growing in this massive world that is journalism. While I don’t think I’ll ever lose my love for telling stories, I recognize the challenge of being in the industry.
And I ask: how will we as journalists address the issue of burnout?