Why journalists are quitting
Today I want to share an article I’m so glad somebody finally wrote: “The COVID Reporters Are Not Okay. Extremely Not Okay.” The brave soul to take this on is Olivia Messer, who was the lead COVID reporter for The Daily Beast until a few months ago. She, like many other journalists (both officially COVID-focused and not), recently quit her job because she was profoundly burned out and depressed, to the point of dissociating. I haven’t done much COVID reporting, but I’ve done enough of it to have touched the edges of this experience. It also helped me understand that my deep and immediate desire to avoid going all-COVID-all-the-time was not born of cowardice or laziness but of self-preservation. It’s a real problem that journalists get told that their coping mechanism for being thrown into traumatic situations with no training or support should be doing more journalism. If I hear a reporter’s notebook described as a shield one more time...
This paragraph particularly resonated with me:
“Journalists are like therapists without the training,” said Jessi Gold, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Therapists often experience burnout and vicarious trauma, which is distinct from burnout and is defined by the American Counseling Association as the “emotional residue” of witnessing “the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured.” But Gold, like others in her field, has a toolbox for addressing it: “Somebody at least taught me how to cope.”
And who, journalist or not, can’t relate to this moment from the theater of the absurd that is now our lives:
As her roommate, I remember a moment where I walked in on her crying on the couch last summer. I had just thrown up, and I had tears streaming down my face. We were sitting there heaving with sobs — if I had to guess, in coffee-stained pajamas — when one of my Alexa’s incremental work-from-home reminders went off: “It’s lunchtime!”
When we stopped laughing at the absurdity of what had just happened, I realized Alexa didn’t know or care that we had lost our minds. Eat lunch? Are you kidding me? The world is falling apart. How are we supposed to eat a salad at a time like this? More than 500,000 people are dead, including colleagues and friends and loved ones, and we were expected to keep eating lunch? Keep pitching? Keep punching out copy?