This Special Edition follows up our previous Mental Health Reset and Balancing Well-being series. Sam Ragland, API’s vice president of journalism programs, will share tools and frameworks to help you establish, implement and measure your newsroom mental health goals.
When API gathered about 50 news leaders alongside a dozen mental health experts in Atlanta last year for our API Local News Summit on Mental Health and Sustainability, it was clear everyone knew things couldn’t just stay the same. The CISLM Local News Burnout Report and the RJI-Smith Geiger research on The Burnout Crisis in Journalism further prove this. In the collective pursuit to attain business sustainability, we were losing the most important element to the business — the journalists.
We, as news leaders, were also losing ourselves. Managing the news cycle and our teams through our own post-pandemic trauma and burnout is no easy task, nor is it even a fair ask of ourselves or from our own managers.
We needed to get from where we were to where we wanted to be. And if this was true for us, then I believe it’s also true for you reading this special API Need to Know series now. You might have participated in our previous Balancing Well-being challenge (and if not, it’s never too late!). Now, several months later, let’s think about what’s changed, what hasn’t and how to build on systemic behavior changes with measurable goals.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, which means the next four Mondays will feature a column on how to measure well-being for yourself and your organization. By the end of Week 4, you’ll have a clear direction and quantitative ways to chart a healthy path forward for your journalists.
— Sam Ragland, vice president of journalism programs
Keep reading: Imagine what better mental health in news looks like
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We’ll dig into three areas that are important to the future of local journalism: civic trust, people and culture and organizational resilience.
Share how the American Press Institute helped change how you lead, think or serve your community — and pay it forward to those shaping local news next.
Across all of our work, we’ve learned that the best solutions start with the people closest to the problem. We use evidence to inform what we do, create room to experiment and share what we learn so others can build on it.
