University of Minnesota associate professor and media industry researcher Dr. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon talks about the effects that growing workplace stressors have on journalists and media creators and what the industry can do about it.
About Our Guest:
Dr. Valérie Bélair-Gagnon is an Associate Professor and Cowles Fellow in Media Management at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is also a Waldfogel Scholars of the College of Liberal Arts (2023-26) and McKnight Presidential Fellow (2022-2025) at the University of Minnesota. She is also a visiting researcher at the Oslo Metropolitan University Department of Journalism and Media and fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. Her research interests include: journalism, professions, knowledge production, and identity; digital labor and engagement; business and future of journalism; and happiness and well-being in work. She is the author of Happiness in Journalism , The Paradox of Connection: How Digital Media is Changing Journalistic Labor, Journalism Research that Matters, and Social Media at BBC News. She was executive director and research scholar at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and fellow at Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She also worked in communications in corporate and non-profit environments. Born in Montréal, she earned her PhD in from the University of London in Sociology.
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This podcast was transcribed automatically. The accuracy of this transcript may vary.
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 00:00
Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you, sir. Thanks for coming today. I know it's the end of the semester and everybody's must be tired. And, and also, thank you so much. I can see some familiar faces from some of the discussion. We had this I had this morning on in different classes. So today, I want to start with a story. So very recently, on February 20 22,023, The Washington Post editorial board published an opinion piece that was titled, more and more trolls and ater attack female journalists. So the editorial talked about a report that was published by the International Journalism center for journalists, the International Center for journalists that showed how the interview the there was an ally of eight and misogyny and violence against eight for female journalists. And the report showed one case study and this is the case study of the case study of IU who's a journalist who is work right now you who works was the image here you can see on the on this slide, she's an investigative journalist for The Washington Post. And she's also a contributor for the opinion section of the Washington Post. And she's also known for covering the investigation of India, Gujarat riots in 2002, Gujarat is a region of India, where there was some riots in which 800 Muslims were killed. And there was some killing that that actually implicated the current prime minister of India, Modi, Narendra Modi, and he was then the Chief Minister of that region of kind of central South Asia, India. And following or report of all of the of these attacks in 2002, the, the the there's an army of troll from the President and his party that F treaded the journalists at scale on a daily basis, some of which I've even for morphed into physical violence. So the article talks about Twitter as being a main vector for the attacks and the platform. And also, the article ends by saying, well, Twitter needs to do something right. Twitter needs to protect journalists. But what's behind this editorial is a little bit more complex. Right? Here we're seeing a culture of news organization that is centered around pushing and pushing and pushing journalists to engage online. Right What little if non support for these journalists right? And and that comes with this culture of online connectivity being on all the social media platform whether you're on like being real winner on your on Twitter, or Tik Tok. And at the same time, it also shows that instead of having a institutional organizational support from organization, often journalists are left on their own, you know, and they have to create different kinds of tactics to response to resist to this kind of culture of online connection, and digital capitalism. So I'll talk I want to talk to you a little bit more about some of the work that I've done and how I've come to study this topic of harassment in journalism and how news organization can tackle this culture of well being in your organization. So when I started my PhD 14 years ago, my work was really around this idea of digital innovation. And I think that you've had some speaker over the years that have over the years, including Torsen, Quint quant came and talked about how in the early 2000s and early 2000 10s, we were really concerned as colors with the inability of news organization to adapt to the rise of the Internet. And subsequently that formed into us kind of criticizing and using, for better or for worse, a bit of a techno utopian ideology of how we need to how knew how we were pushing organization to adapt to these different technologies that were that were coming on. So I was, I was like a part of that problem. So my first ethnography was on the BBC, and I was looking at user generated content, like images, texts, testimonial and videos. And I was looking at how journalists could use user generated content in a very positive way in news organization without looking at kind of the dark side of that kind of engagement. So the work that we were doing, were really saying news organization, that's, it's a problem that you're not adapting to technology is going to affect journalism, and potentially it will die. So in a way, we, although we were grounded in the reality of journalists, we were really grounded in that ideology of techno utopianism without questioning it without being critical about it. So when you're looking back at these, at that research, we were all already seeing sign of alarms like in early in the like 2010. I know that sounds kind of weird because now we're like everybody uses social media in journalism. But you know, in 2010, it was kind of new. And scholars like to Robinson was saying that it was that it was leaving people behind, right? Perhaps give leaving them with less opportunities. And they were just talking about how people who were, the older generation may not want it to integrate social media as much as people for younger generation, therefore, given them less opportunities of growth in US organization. And then in 2015, Caitlin Petrie from the wrote a towel report for the Tao journalism Center at Columbia University. Web analytics and online metrics, you know, how you measure how you measure who reads what online, and she said something along the line of there was a lot of anxiety in newsroom about metrics, because of the possible impact of the analytics on the quality of civic journalism, you know, public journalism. So but she said that over time people have move on, they moved on from fearing analytics to largely accepting them as part of what it meant to do journalism in the digital age. So we, a lot of us, were pointing to briefly, you know, to this idea of tension between these market driven imperatives of online engagement with the democratic ideals of journalism. So this brings me to the third component of the research, which is the dark side of online connective practices, right? Well, we have all these opportunities from for online engagement, increased polarization abuse, increase in abuse in a facility, especially since the rise of populist governments, again, against journalists have created this environment, where wellbeing of journalists is has been really affected. So where do I stand there? So a little bit about my kind of journey into that. So once I realized I needed to take a step and become more critical of the work that I was doing around innovation and journalism, and really talk and think about, what does that mean to innovate and create a well, a culture of well being while we're innovating and thinking about technology in the work of journalism? I've done a training. So I know that on campus, when I was doing a visit, earlier on, I saw that you had like a mental health building. So at the University of Minnesota, we have something similar called the Boyton clinic. And within that there's a mental health program. And there is a program called Boyton, health mental health advocates, which I'm not a part of, which is a training where you're learning about the different resources that are on campus, and how to think about bringing more mental health awareness in universities. And so I did that, and through this program, I've learned about this idea of mental health as a public health problem, right. So we all know that mental health is, is not like it's not an individual problem, it's like it's something that is that is public, that is that we can prevent. And that we can that that every little, every little change matters. So I'll give you an example of kind of what we call micro changes and mental health problem at the university level. And then I'm gonna give you an example, in a journalism level, and what it can look like. So at the university level, we've noticed that students are always one semester, I'm sure that you've experienced that you always have like one assignment that is late, right. And so we've noticed that the in my huge class of 170 students like getting maybe like 300 requests or email to this semester, or maybe 600, requests of late assignment can be very difficult for a teaching assistant to manage, and for the instructor to kind of verify everything, and it could be stressful for students to ask for these extensions. So one of the things that we did is we kind of simply did a small change where we've removed assignments. As the we move to assignment, we said you can have two assignment during the semester, no question asked, it can be late. And you can submit it whenever you want during a semester. So that's a micro change. So what does that look in journalism, an example of journalism could be
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 09:19
you have an audience team, so the there's a local news organization that has an audience team and one person was looking at all the online engagement and comments from people. And that had become really, really difficult. And birders burdensome for that one journalist. So what the team decided to do is to rotate. So instead, all of the everyday and different journalists of the team would retain during the week and look at it, what it created was empathy toward others understanding that understanding the experience of other people looking at the difficult comment that they're seeing online, and also peer support, like the ability to talk about it with other people in the news organization. So that's kind of like the idea behind this, this, this this approach that I started kind of digging more into as I was looking into, how can we develop this culture of well being in the media industry. Alright, so now you're gonna say, Well, I'm if I'm going into the media industry, I need to be there I need to be online and engage with, with communities online. So what we found is last summer, the Pew Research Center, which is a research center, based in DC looking at, there's a part of it that looks at journalism did a research on and I know that set loves those, the Pew Research Center to so they looked at online engagement. And what they found is that most journalists are kind of excited to work in the in these in these jobs, they actually also found that social media is very helpful for journalists to do their jobs. But the paradox of this is that when you're looking at the numbers of who gets harassed online, in the form of harassment is that the common most common form of harassment that journalists gets? It's from online six 70% that they found among us, journalists who have reported that they had been harassed online. Right. But and also, they also found that about four and 10 journalists have been harassed by someone that is outside of their workplace, which is probably related to the work that they do. So this is this is a problem that we're seeing. Another problem that we're seeing is that mental health is really affecting the, the it's not kind of a soft, what what would have originally been considered, or or I've been told that maybe what I'm proposing is a soft, is a softer approach, but it's not a softer approach, because it's affecting the retention. And it's affecting the onboarding of new and talent, talented employee. So for looking at the effect of mental health on recruitment and retention. So first of all, a lot of people decide turns out that they decide to not go in journalism anymore, because the pay could be better somewhere else, right? They could you I mean, you can go into journalism school, learn a lot of skills, and you can use those skills for other kind of position for other kinds of jobs. So what So what, that's one thing, the second thing is that they're again, related as these new option you can work in communication, you can work in PR, if you study journalism, you can end up working on so many other kind of area of life. And also, what my discussion with journalists also, in my in discussion with journalists, I also found that for which is, which I say that lightly like it's good, it's a good news for you entering the industry, in the sense of lots of people are having, there's much less people applying for jobs. So for places where in the, in the past, like 10 years ago, there'll be 200 people applying for a job now that maybe like 10 people applying for a particular job. So that has changed a lot. And then people because of the hostile audience and difficulty with engagement. The people are deciding to choose different carrier paths, because they want to have a better quality of life. And overall, this has a snowball effect, where editors and managers that are trying to hire journalists are also feeling overwhelmed and overworked because they're not able to retain and they always have to, like look for new talents. So that that is a that has become a problem. So today, I'm going to talk to you about some of the work that I've done through interview observation and textual analysis of journalistic work that looks into this dark side of online connectivity. So widely what we found in our research is that intersectionality is center is the is this as a central world in journalism, wellbeing, right. So in that we've published with every Alton Danna Bosco in Australia, in login Molinar in us, we found that woman journalists and people of color and actually sets also found that in a recent study that he published a couple of weeks ago, experience harassment differently than male counterpart part that is not to say that Melbourne experienced harassment, but it's just that you know, that harassment is often based on gender and race and different other forms of identity. So what we found is that journalists experienced, I've experienced three forms of harassment, acute, chronic and escalatory harassment. So acute harassment happens when there's less personalization, and it's focused on one event. So for example, one of one journalists who cover local political rallies said that They came to expect a series of awful treat following the rallies. But once the rally is done that subsidizes then they don't really they don't learn much more about the the harassers anymore chronic harassment, or that's harassment that is more sustained toward one social media user or a group of user over a period of time. And that was reported more by women than their male counterpart. So female journalist reported that this form of harassment targeted them more for their content, and if less for their content and more for their character and their perceived sexuality. So we found this other thing called chronic harassment, right that that's a third type of harassment that journalists were experiencing. And one journalist when they talking about they were talking about chronic these forms of chronic harassment, Sid, said, are along those lines, where else am I? Where else am I so exposed on a daily basis to literature, literally, the world Old World, and where else the old world decides whether or not I can report on the murder trial, because of the way I smell all myself in my profile picture? Because there's no way in hell a woman can cover important things like like that without being told how she looks or should look constantly, right? So faced with chronic harassment, women were left to wonder what is the line between that kind of playful banter and that journalists could in ways that they could connect with reader and what kind of what's the other side of this when your your left like scared, you're less violated for what might come next in your life. So this raises the concern of escalatory harassment against reported primarily by women journalists introduced in our study. So this form of harassment really moved from this idea of what I talked about earlier, acute or chronic form of harassment, to direct threats against journalists, personally, or professionally, or even news organization, right. And these threats that were reported in the studies included trust to report journalists to an editor, or to local official, because it's time for them to pay for for being an ignorant, for example, or a threat of physical encounter threats against a journalist, family and friends, threats that bring down their news organization and the exposure of journalists personal information. So to the ladder, at least one journalist reported that social media user, moving their engagement, reported that moving their engagement from Twitter to Facebook and then tick tock where the journalists tried to keep content personal and less publicly facing. So this practice has, we will argue, in our forthcoming book that said had mentioned is a central part of what we are talking about when we're talking about the paradox of online connective practices, and what it does to journalism. So the other thing that we found is that while that not then we were like, okay, so what what do you do as a journalist, when you're faced with that form of harassment, it's like, what are our news organization doing to support you? So what people in the studies mentioned is that there were barely any training or preventative measure against harassment, beyond these training, video, or human resources, information regarding harassment within the organization. So one journalist said, connect, connect, we hear that every week at a newsroom meeting, where all the numbers and how we can and are or are not hitting our mark, with connection, but as soon as we say So, someone said something awful about me, what should I do about this? The conversation ends, and then it's back to connect, right?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 18:58
And so, to address these forms of arrest, these form of chronic and escalatory harassment organization offered a number of press press, press, press cryptic and individually oriented solutions. So some people said, go to yoga, have a glass of wine, some responded with positive you comment? Are you more? Don't worry, everything will be fine. They were also saying like, you can go and run do some education. Here's some insurances that you can have access to. So there wasn't really any systemic effort or like that what I was talking about earlier, like the kind of preventative measure of public of mental health as a public health issue, that news organization were taking on and that is central to the problem of connection. And another problem also is that a lot of scholar have been talking about including Sylvia waste board At University of George Washington is this idea that this form of connection, these forms of connection and possibility of harassment, really effects may end up affecting journalism speech, no, leading to what he calls mob censorship. So what we're doing in this, in this book that we're talking, we're caught we called The Paradox of connection is we're trying to reimagine what labor can look like now, with online connectivity, right? It's not enough to say anymore that we that we want to innovate so that journalism can survive, we need to question how these new innovation are bringing new forms of labor practices in journalism. So as a media, sociologists, and a journalism studies scholars, I've always been interested in the individual, you know, the practical thing, how journalists are doing thing, like all these journalistic practices, and how people live and experience their lives. But I've also been really interested in this kind of rather, institutional forces, like we're not alone, there are institutional forces that are kind of helping organize or live. So what we what what I think is that we have a long way coming up for news organization for fostering this culture of well being and journalism. And we're in and working and in working with technological tech and platform companies to do so. So here are argument in our book is that we should expect journalists to engage online and offline with different communities, you know, because that's important, that's central to journalism, journalism, to be able to serve different different communities. But with connection also comes in the connection is beautiful connection also comes with in a continuum with this idea of disconnection. I know that I've been to several classes so far, and I've today and I've noticed that few students have like, Oh, you have like all these tools, where you're like trying to mediate how you're thinking about how you're connecting online, you know, how long are you going to spend on Facebook are you going to stop your alerts, so you don't see your text messages. So you have like all of this in your toolbox. And our argument is that we have to look more into all of these disconnected practices to be able to reconnect with what journalism should be doing. So we have to think about the technology, the affordances of the technology, the time that we spend on the technology, and the cultural and social impact that we that these technology have in real life, like the in the context of harassment and what it can do for journalism. So we think that this kind of continuum between the idea of connectivity and the idea of in the idea of disconnection, where you can like Quraysh, for your profile, you can ignore people, you can mute, you can block you can delete, you can report, you can reverse or contra troll, or you can, you know, talk to the police if it comes to like in person encounter with people, these have all become part of what journalism is, and how it should it should be recognized as part of the of news organization culture, for the well being of journalist. So our argument here and in this in this book is that we do have to acknowledge that social media engagement practices are a necessary skill. But disconnection is also a necessary skill to learn how to do good journalism, how to report the truth, how to be able to connect to different communities. So we are in the process of working on different ideas to like, how can we support and that's a conversation, I'd love to have with you, how we can create these different spaces in the culture of news organization, to be supportive of the development of journalists so that they can learn all these skills, but also feel supported by a community to do the work that they do. And we think that as a result, it's going to help a news organization to be able to, to be able to serve to actually survive and be sustainable in the long term. So I'm happy to talk to you more about this. And I'm also happy to talk to you more about some of in the q&a, some of the strategies, some of the resources that I have, because there are there are quite a quite a lot of helpful resources that you can use in your future career. And but I just want to point out that this kind of work is not possible without kind of an army of other people. So I just wanted to give an acknowledgement to all the people that have been working on where we work at different intersection and things set I've listed. So different people that have helped us kind of think about these issues and students that have worked with us for this project on the paradox of connection. So I just wanted to thank you and open up to a discussion of About practices and everything that you're interested in talking about. Thank you.
Seth Lewis 25:04
Are there services and programs that cater specifically towards journalists regarding online harassment?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 25:12
So there are a couple of them that I can mention that now. But I do have a really extensive list, the International Center for Women has had a really good resource they call Coalition Against Violence, and they have emergency assistance. For people that you can call, there's also the International Media Woman Foundation, they have a black journalists therapy relief fund Relief Fund, they have a distressed network, and also a bunch of other resources for journalist trauma support. And they have also grants that you can apply to, if you want to do AV work in the area it's in. Whereas this program, they have different kind of grants here, fund for a woman journalist. And then there's also troll busters, which has, I know that people who are going to go in journalists are going to feel that they work a lot. And it's really can be kind of intensive kind of work environment. But I really recommend those they're like shorts, you know, it's worth 90 minutes of your time, it's worth an extra three hour of your time. So there are these different digital defense courses. So defense against digital art for journalist or online security for journalists. So these are some of the kind of, I would say, some of the big resources that are that can be helpful. Were you thinking about this particular kind of resource or? No? Yeah, yeah. Because I think like a lot of you are probably going to end up maybe you may not work for one big organization, you may work for a few of them. So these resources are very helpful for supporting people who may not have these may or may not have the resources of a big organization, like the New York Times, but there's also the there's also different professional association that may have programs. So the online news organization be, you'd be worried just kind of looking at these different Association who they have training or different resources as well.
Seth Lewis 27:15
How much responsibility do you see journalists employers taking for encouraging or helping them disconnect?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 27:21
Yeah, I think it's important. Okay, so I have like so many ideas for you. But I think like, this is a really important question. Because what we found from our research is that most news organization may not have the resources to support journalists to do that. So that's why we've we would want my colleague, we found that we were sort of at a point in our career where we could really be more critical and advocating for that and criticizing, and we're also criticizing us organization, and also in a position where we are teaching students. So we're hoping that by talking to more and more students, like, there's going to create this awareness. So I think, like, looking for that, when you like I said, there's there's tons of job in journalism. So looking for that and advocating for a culture of your own self care and well being and user organization is really important. And that can go to when you're looking for a job, you can look at the social media policy, what's in a social media policy. And there's there's no support for journalists to find themselves in different situation. So I teach a media management course, and I teach students how to read annual reports. For many organizations. So like the public media organization, when you look at their annual report, it's kind of a very interesting kind of way into understanding what they really want to do what organization really wants to do. So if you look at their annual report, or website, or you can kind of Google and find out, like what they've read, you can also look at what they've done in the past with journalists, you know, how they fire journalists, because they responded to a troll. There's no some organization have done that. So does it match with your own values? Right? So kind of that's the first part of I think that we we have to advocate for own self care and wellness in US organization. But they are, there are examples. And full examples of organizations that are trying to help and change and support journalists. So some organizations, some places, if especially in the space of trauma reporting, reporting on trauma reporting on crisis crises, you'll see that there are steps in use organization for different kinds of it for if you're doing different kinds of stories. So if you're doing your stories, that stories that you think are going to be traumatic for the journalists, it's talking about it at the beginning and talking about what might happen and how the journalists may be secured. Whether it is like that Keeping a phone close or having like your phone you There are apps that that you find me apps that you can have on your phone where friends can keep in touch with you, or it or it could be like during the reporting of the story talking about it and talking with your editor constantly about what's going on and providing different resources and then do a briefing debriefing to figure out like is, are there processes that we can change in the news organization so that it exists that in some kind of reporting, it has been more frequent than in others? Other kind of reporting? Does that answer did that answer your question? But I think like a lot of it goes to like, I really hope that that students that I, that I that we talked to, and the more that we talked about that I really hope that this is going to be solved within a couple of years.
Seth Lewis 30:51
In modern journalism, being connected and being on social media is essential. A lot of the things you were talking about, are an organization having policies to enable disconnecting in harm reduction. Is there anything on the offensive as opposed to the defensive in terms of things like troll busting, for instance, talking to social media platforms about limiting harassment?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 31:12
Yeah, so there is this report, which so I think from an advocacy person, my answer is yes, from an advocacy perspective. So there's this report, the where the video that I showed you, called the chilling, which is a global study of on woman online violence, that was published last summer, which talks about all the things that social platform companies have done and not done. So it's kind of listed out there, unfortunately, what what it finds is that a lot of these initiatives have not really worked. And part of it is that the some of the platform company initiatives came from their PR department. And wasn't it that it didn't really solve the kind of overall problem, but I think that there's some companies are trying to figure out how to authenticate people, if they become because a simple solution would be to attend ticket people as public purse, a journalist as public personality, which would make a big difference in terms of how they would be treated online. But I think a lot of it's still kind of slow. But the chilling lists all of the different strategies and how female journalists have responded to, to these strategies.
Seth Lewis 32:31
Going off of that being identified as a public figure online, you're going to be harassed, there's an inevitability to that. Do you think anonymizing some reporting would help?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 32:42
Yeah, yeah. So one of the tactic that I actually recommend is to have different accounts. So you can have profit your professional account, and you have, you can have your personal account as separated accounts on social in different social media platforms, and have your personal account made private. So that's one way in which that kind of removes like a little bit of your personal life been been used, and that people cannot use that information against you. So that could be one of the solution. Yeah, so boundary is really important for look, if you're talking about solution, having different kinds of boundaries, like limited, you're limiting your time or, or creating different profile is also a solute could be also seen as solutions.
Seth Lewis 33:34
Going back to your book, what would you say are the primary takeaways you hope media managers or journalists might get from this?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 33:40
Yeah, I think thank you. That's an interesting, that's a very good question. I think that for journalists is that the book really lays out all of these different practices. So what I'm hearing here is that all these kinds of boundary practices, the the boundary, nut boundary work in terms of journalism studies, but like really like psychologic, from a psychological sense of like, all these practices to create boundaries around your professional life and your personal life that people are trying to do. So. Hopefully, the they can see that they're not alone. And they can see that people have also experienced, having similar experiences and relate to that and learn about these boundaries. Learn about how ethics is a very powerful is a very powerful place also for happiness in journalism. You know, when you're thinking like, Oh, why am I like this journalist and the story that I showed, like, why am I doing this story, you know, but no, she's doing the story because she wants to report the truth. You know, she wants to report like an objective, like relatively objective truth. She wants to hold people accountable to power and these are things that like the ethics of journalism is a very powerful tool for happiness. You know, when you don't know and when you if people are trying to suppress your species are very powerful tool to kind of get into and trying to be have tears. And the other thing is, I think kind of a cry for help for a news organization to realize that this is really serious. And it's like beyond just kind of an individual story that he may have experienced in the newsroom. It is also students, students who are going to apply for jobs, it's going to affect like, the who's going to apply for this position and what kind of lifestyle they're going to have. And so I think it's kind of a cry for asking news organization to, to create different micro changes or create a more systemic approach to integrating these disconnected practices as part of work because these practices right now there are a lot of them are not accepted, that not really accepted as part of journalism, and what and because it affects more women and people of color, it really has an effect on the professional development of a really big group of people who should be in the newsroom and creating more diversity in terms of reporting. So these are two, two kind of practical, take away. One of them, you didn't ask about this, but I like to be a little bit self deprecating sometimes, one of the things that I wished I would have done more is and is probably going to be the next next project. But it's more about, you know, then what can platform do, but we didn't really get at the point of platform, we really stepped at the point of what can journalists and news organization do in the book.
Seth Lewis 36:25
The nature of the platforms themselves are designed to generate user involvement. So within that, do you see limits to individual coping strategies? How we deal with this versus other efforts to change the way the platform's function, having broader protections for workers on the job. If you could talk about the tension on how far individual mechanisms can go, when the platforms are designed to be so hard to disconnect, and the employer pressures to stay connected? And finally, how far do you see this individual effort going versus the collective approach?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 36:55
Yeah, that's a great, really great question. Obviously, I tried to think about this. So that's something that I tried to think about, it's a hard thing to decipher, because I think that it's hard to have companies, platform companies in this in the digital capitalism, world that we are, but in the in the book, both in the book and the article that was provided for for this class, we use we there's like a specific sentence where we talked about act of resistance. So I almost see as this act of disconnection as like resistance to this online platform capitalism. So like, in a way, if like, collectively, as a community, we are resisting to it, I'm doing these digital connective practices. And then we're also at the same time, it's like a collective action of, of rejecting the some of the affordances of these companies, awfully that will provide change, because that will change the way in which they think that people can use the platform. So that's kind of more of a like a hopeful, kind, tactical perspective on this. But I think it's really important to think about these disconnected practices as resistance.
Seth Lewis 38:13
How does this paradoxical connection relate to other areas of work, for example, influencers are expected to be online all the time and manage a level of audience engagement? That is unsustainable?
38:23
Yeah, I think Brooke Duffy has talked a lot about that, especially in the context of Atlantic City. So that's like a, I would say that a little bit different from Drew. Well, there's certain form of journalism that can like tap into that, but this idea of always trying to be authentic online, and you're putting your own self and your identity. It's a little bit like closer to influencer. But I would say maybe it depends on the type of influencing work that you're doing. If you're like an activist, or if you're, or if you're doing fashion. That may be kind of you may have different kinds of it may or may be different experiences. Yeah, I guess influencer could be one.
Seth Lewis 39:08
The title of your talk is happiness in journalism. Coming back to that for a moment, what does happiness look like in journalism or other knowledge work? Obviously, it involves both better work life balance, but what other things are we talking about? Was the happiness before? What are the essential things that might lead to more happiness in journalism and media work?
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon 39:26
Well, happiness is a like, I think maybe whelming like capitalists are more catchy, like happiness is more about kind of being in the moment or like, you know, being like grateful about what you have. So there's like all these different kinds of component of what happiness is. But in well being is kind of a general sense of like, what like a sense of state of being well and being like good and you're having a good life, right. So which is not necessarily like which is part of part of happiness, but it's not I completely park just at penis. So I think that so we have like this, you're talking about the other book. So we have another book coming up, which is volume, happiness in journalism, and the way that we're trying to think about this, but I think that, you know, reading and looking at all these 22 different chapters that people have submitted for the book, it really is about all of these kinds of personal active resilience, it's about how individual can make a difference in their workplace environment, but it's also about the institutional level of it, and how organization can take more action to it. And it's also about kind of speaking truth to power speaking to, to these platform companies who are creating this work environment for the for the journalist and the news organization that are involved in it. So I think that, you know, from a practical perspective, the educator, I think the role of educator and the ways in which we can include like, concept and idea of well being in the way that we teach journalism to our students, and outside of like a single trauma reporting class, right, and then you're lucky that the university if you have a trauma, trauma informed reporting class, so I think it's kind of thinking about it to have every step of the way to create like that culture of happiness or well being. Please join me in giving thanks