Year: 2024
Type: review
Abstract: Being a journalist is hard emotional work, but this is too often overlooked, both in everyday life and in academia.Journalists are expected to be self-taught experts at solving their own emotional jigsaw puzzles throughout every part of the journalistic process, every single day.It is an almost mystical set of skills essential for success in both their professional and private lives.Managing Emotions in Journalism dissects many pieces of these complex puzzles and acts as a guide on how to efficiently solve them.The author Maja Šimunjak describes journalism as an "emotional journey" filled with frustration, nervousness, and anxiety, but also excitement, elation, and pride.It involves high emotional labour, significantly impacting journalists' well-being, the stories they produce, and their decisions to remain committed to this rather stressful profession.The aim of this book is to raise awareness of various emotional situations that journalists encounter and to offer guidance on emotion management strategies -not just to survive but to be resilient, and ultimately -content.The core of this guide to enhancing journalists' resilience consists of interviews with more than thirty British journalists who share their personal, sometimes intimate reflections on working as reporters, editors, and presenters.Šimunjak explores common emotional situations that arise in journalism and discusses with interviewees their personal strategies for managing them.The book is structured around seven key themes related to emotional situations journalists face.In each chapter, recognizing and addressing these situations is mapped against a three-step process of emotion management: the "stop, think, choose" method that enables journalists to more intelligently and consciously respond to stressors in their everyday work.Šimunjak identifies the four most common emotion management strategies that journalists use to deal with different emotional situations: verbal processing, internal processing, boundary setting, and attentional deployment.The first chapter introduces the concepts of emotional intelligence and resilience as key personal resources in emotional labour.It presents the three-step process of emotion management as a useful strategy.This chapter also sums up the key emotional situations and emotion management strategies that the author identified in her research.Chapter two explores the emotional dynamics of finding a story -from anxiety and excitement of working on a big story or securing a scoop, to dread of not having a story.It also covers the emotional situations of feeling both hopeful and anxious before pitching an idea to the editor, and the frustration when the pitch is unsuccessful.Breaking down a task into smaller steps, changing one's perspective, and talking to colleagues to gain emotional release and support are detailed as some of emotional management techniques.Emotions related to getting in touch with a source, interviewing them, and feeling a responsibility towards them are covered in chapter three.The emotions under scrutiny include journalists being nervous when talking to influential people, frustrated when nobody responds to their calls or emails, and experiencing a mix of nervousness, excitement, and pride when interviewing someone and helping them tell their story.These situations
Author: Kovačević, Petra
Institution: University of Zagreb
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6983294410