With free speech and press freedoms being challenged, it’s more important now than ever to prioritize the mental health of journalists.
This is according to speakers on the March 28, 2025, panel “How to avoid news avoidance and burnout of journalists and audiences” at the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ).
Alongside considerations of journalist mental health and burnout, the researchers and professors also discussed why audiences avoid the news and what can be done to bring them back.
A “call to action” for newsrooms
In her 20 years as a broadcast journalist, panel chair Kate West, assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, said she was only ever asked about her mental health twice.
When she started teaching, West said she noticed young journalists were continuously graduating, getting jobs and then leaving the field three to five years later because they were not prepared for the mental health challenges they faced in newsrooms. This inspired West to incorporate mental wellness lessons in the classroom.
“ If we can prepare these soon-to-be journalists for the mental health challenges associated with our profession, then they'll be better prepared when they are covering a fatal car accident, a fire (and) mass shootings…for how they're going to feel, what they're going to think, and how they're going to deal with it,” West said.
Debriefing with journalists, ensuring staff has access to therapy and paying writers a livable wage are all ways West said newsrooms can support the holistic wellness of their reporters, especially when the next generation of writers is settling less for poor industry standards.
“This next generation, they are not willing to just take anything, and I'm really proud of them for that,” West said. “If we want to keep good journalists, (if) we want to keep them from being burned out on the job, these are some things that we need to be able to do.”
News avoidance and digital platforms
Benjamin Toff, associate professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Journalism Center, presented his research on how digital media use often contributes to news avoidance among younger generations.
Toff said many young people in his research expressed that scrolling social media was a way they could escape from the stressors of their everyday lives.
This contrasted with how Toff’s participants felt about consuming the news. Toff said many people he interviewed felt anxious when they read the news which led to many of them avoiding news sources altogether. Further, many young people felt they were getting newsworthy information through their social media platforms, and didn’t need to scroll through news sources to feel informed.
Even so, Toff said his research showed that many young people didn’t like the amount of time they spent on social media, which led to some users logging off completely and not getting any news at all. To solve this, Toff said newsroom strategies need to evolve and leverage the positive, experiential aspects of social media to get more information into the hands of the next generation.
“There are ways of satisfying those needs of audiences, but it has to come from recognizing that it's the experience of the news consumption,” Toff said. “It's not just the information that people are looking for.”
The journalist’s predicament
Sandra Vera Zambrano, associate professor at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, shared why people continue to pursue journalism, even at a time when the payoff seems low. She shared that it’s a specific type of person— someone willing to make sacrifices—who keeps the profession viable.
“That is precisely the predicament,” Zambrano said. “Even when everything seems to fall apart, you journalists take a deep breath and make the show go on anywhere in the world.”
In the 10 years of research Zambrano conducted with her associate, she said the common theme that kept journalists in the field was the belief that journalism was worthwhile, even if it took a toll on the journalist’s mental health.
“Every journalist (we) met believed that what they do is worthy,” Zambrano said. “Some other people would call it a ‘call’ or a ‘vocation,’ and that's exactly what helps us understand that journalists still believe that doing journalism is important against all the odds.”
Zambrano shared that the emotional skills gained in the journalism field are vast. Though many people choose to leave the profession due to high stress, the call to action many journalists feel based on their own personal experiences makes the field an accessible one.
“Journalists have the goal or the vocation to manage disappointment,” Zambrano said. “What is magical is that every single person does that differently according to one's context and history. Optimistically, these different social horizons allow everyone to find a place in journalism.”
Journalists’ perspectives on news avoidance
Stephanie Edgerly, professor and associate dean of research at Northwestern University, wrapped up the presentations with her research on journalists’ perspectives on news avoidance.
Edgerly said journalists blamed news avoidance on three things: the news avoiders themselves, the characteristics of the news (whether it is too negative or too biased) and the overall busy nature of people’s lives.
Out of the three sources to blame, Edgerly said the most commonly cited sources were characteristics of the news. She said most journalists in the study understood that the nature of the news itself often kept people away.
“‘Because news is depressing as hell,’” Edgerly said, quoting a journalist in the study. “‘I'm a media professional, so I feel obligated to consume the news, but I often don't want to.’”
When asked if there was any hope in converting news avoiders into people who regularly consumed the news, Edgerly shared that 66% of journalists said there was.
Against her initial thoughts, Edgerly said this finding didn’t change depending on a journalist’s rank or prestige but was based on personal beliefs.
“This was largely grounded in who you are,” Edgerly said, “what your individual characteristics (are), not your professional characteristics.”
Hasina Shah is a senior journalism student at the University of Texas. She specializes in audio journalism and longform feature narratives. She is the editor-in-chief of BurntXOrange magazine and the executive producer of partnerships at The Drag Audio Production House.