Culture & Inclusion

Sustainability cannot simply focus on finances. If we want to do better journalism, sustainability must also focus on building community, inside and outside of the newsroom.

This is a column on how to measure well-being for yourself and your organization. By the end, you’ll have a clear direction and quantitative ways to chart a healthy path forward for your journalists.

Source tracking can be a daunting task, but if you take some time to talk through the process and intended impact with staff first it will only help you explain your work to your audiences—especially at a time in our society when doing this necessary self-reflection and reparative work can face pushback from politicians and the public.

Experts define moral injury as the suffering that comes from witnessing, perpetrating or failing to prevent events that violate one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values. It is not classified as a mental illness, but it can lead to depression, substance abuse or burnout, which is one reason news managers need to understand the phenomenon of moral injury — and ways to address it or head it off.

With all of the demands on a newsroom, how do you make time to build new habits in pursuit of larger goals?

You’ve made it through the first week of prioritizing well-being! What activities made a positive impact on your day? Were there any that were difficult to accomplish?

The cohort shares its learnings with newsrooms working to identify gaps and opportunities to broaden sourcing and find ways to better reflect the deep diversity of communities in their coverage.

Why a 20-day, 20-action challenge? Because prioritizing the well-being of ourselves, our journalists, and by relation, our organizations takes deliberate steps toward healthy habits and self-awareness.

Five actions to take this week to build resilient mental health habits.

You will never know how your community is engaging with your coverage unless you ask. Our partners at the Record-Journal in Meriden, Conn., experienced this firsthand after holding more than 80 conversations with community members and hearing from more than 2,000 survey respondents.