JERAA 2024 Conference: Forward: facing the next wave of journalism disruption

Jennifer Stromer-Galley

Dorothy Wickham

Dorothy Wickham is a highly experienced Solomon Islands journalist, media and communications specialist with an in-depth understanding of Pacific politics, culture and effective communication practices. Based in Honiara, she was a long standing host of the RAMSI (Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands 2003-2017) national radio talkback program, Talking Truth; managing editor of One News Television; and founding editor of social media site, Melanesian New Network. Her keynote conversation with Centre for Advancing Journalism Senior Lecturer, Jo Chandler – ‘Beyond geopolitics: Challenges for Pacific journalists in meeting “western” media expectations’ – will frame geopolitical shifts dominating much talk around Pacific affairs as a significant issue for journalists and editors in the region, within a maelstrom of political, social, environmental and economic change. This change includes global digital disruption of media markets; disruption that has now arrived in the Pacific. Wickham will consider this in a context of changing education levels and population ratios, with profound implications for who is reading or tuning in to mainstream media.

Wednesday 27 November 2024

Well-being in media and creative careers:

What makes you happy can also make you sick

Keynote by Professor Mark Deuze and panel discussion on future-proofing media practitioners and students for career risks.

This panel explores factors in media careers that affect the well-being of media professionals—including online or offline threats, bullying, physical and sexual harassment, mental health issues and cultural safety—and some ways that current practitioners and students seeking future careers in media industries can take action to reduce or mitigate key risks.

University of Amsterdam’s Mark Deuze will present a keynote on the association between work-related psychosocial risk factors and stress-related mental disorders, and the factors that lead to people becoming sick from pressures, stressors, and other potentially problematic aspects that are characteristic of media work.

A panel comprised of four industry, academic and media-focused non-profit professionals will explore approaches for engaging in and teaching risk assessment/management in media careers. The panel will address the increasing prevalence and severity of online abuse of media practitioners, cultural safety for media practitioners from diverse backgrounds, and trauma-informed journalism skills in increasingly digitised workspaces.

Panel biographies:

Mark Deuze is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Humanities. Before that he worked as a journalist and academic in the United States at Indiana University Bloomington, in Germany at the University of Münster, and in South Africa at the University of Johannesburg. Publications of his include 100+ papers in academic journals and 14 books, including most recently “Happiness in Journalism” (volume co-edited with Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Avery Holton and Claudia Mellado, published with Routledge, 2023).

Amantha Perera is a journalism academic and PhD candidate at University of South Australia and Project Lead at the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, Asia Pacific, who focuses on building expertise on safe and professional digitally enhanced journalism workspaces.

Angela Romano, an Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology, has been investigating the nature of risk-management in Australian university-level journalism programs and how they prepare students for career risks.

Mariam Veiszadeh is the CEO of Media Diversity Australia and an award-winning human rights advocate, lawyer, diversity and inclusion practitioner, contributing author and social commentator.

Nicolle White is ABC’s Social Media Wellbeing Advisor. This global-first role within a media organisation focuses on how to prepare for and respond to online harm. She has also worked with the eSafety Office to create guidelines for journalists.

Keynote: Mark Deuze

There is a well-documented mental health crisis among media professionals (in journalism, advertising, public relations and marketing communications, film, cinema and television, digital games, music and recording, and online content creation) worldwide. This project offers an analysis of systemic issues throughout the media industries, explains what is particular about wellbeing in media work, and documents what is and can be done.

The romantic aura of the creative career – the passionate engagement of its practitioners, the labor-of-love ethic that inspires so many to overcommit, the suffering for one’s art that characterizes the work – obscures the fact that jobs and careers in the media exist in a context of profound exploitation which does not only occur through the way in which the industries are structured and managed, it also comes about by the way practitioners so embody their labour.

To illustrate the extent of the crisis: on average more than half of practitioners in the various media industries (as consistently documented in numerous surveys over the last decade among representative samples of professionals around the world) experience poor mental health due to circumstances at work. About ninety percent of workers endure bullying, discrimination and harassment on the job. Two-thirds envision leaving the industry altogether due to work negatively impacting their well-being – and one in ten at times consider taking their own life.

This project engages the health crisis in media head on by combining the insights gained from a review of industry sources, a review of published scholarly work in media management and production studies, and meta-reviews in the field of occupational medicine on the association between work-related psychosocial risk factors and stress-related mental disorders. Building on this framework, I explain what exactly turns pressures, stressors, and other potentially problematic yet particular aspects of media work into people getting sick on the job.

In conclusion, I offer a range of evidence-based suggestions about what to do about the mental health crisis in media work, including tactics and strategies for individual practitioners, best practices for media organizations and firms, and recommendations for captains of industry, shareholders and policymakers, as well as for media scholars and educators.

Register to attend JERAA Conference 2024, 26-29 November today:

https://events.humanitix.com/journalism-education-and-research-association-of-australia-jeraa-conference-2024-xu37vwf2