Managers, Talk About Your Fears!

Supposedly, the days are over when newsrooms resembled macho hives, war reporters were the cool guys with armoured souls and journalists could only guess a colleague’s burnout by the length of a sick leave. At least that’s how Phil Chetwynd, Global News Director at the AFP news agency, sees it. While 10 to 15 years ago newsrooms were dominated by a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, since then not only has the discussion about mental health in the workplace reached a different level; appropriate structures have also been put in place, Chetwynd said on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. This was necessary, he added, as journalists worldwide were facing unprecedented pressure.

In fact, just scrolling through the festival program provides a good overview of all the pain points: Eroding business are squeezing budgets and AI is accelerating the pace of innovation, while authoritarian politicians and their vassals are discrediting journalism, threatening journalists and sowing mistrust or even hostility towards the profession among the population, which is expressed both online and offline. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that some media executives have not yet understood this with all its consequences.

In fact, business models can only be made resilient if you take care of those who are supposed to do so. And for all the reasons mentioned, the media industry has lost its appeal. Many journalists and media managers are questioning their career choice or leaving for calmer waters if they can. And the next generations don’t even feel tempted to join. In editorial offices that operate according to the old principle “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”, things could soon become breezy. Starting your own business is an alternative. However, it is more suitable for workaholics and self-exploiters, as was made clear on one or two other panels. So even in start-ups, there is no harm in thinking about mental health at an early stage.

Journalist and consultant Hannah Storm – on stage with Chetwynd – has published a book on the subject in 2024. “Mental Health and Wellbeing for Journalists” is based on 45 interviews with media people and trauma experts from all over the world. Key is to create safe spaces for conversations about the topic, said Storm. And anyone who thinks of post-traumatic stress disorder primarily in terms of war correspondents is underestimating the extent of the issue. For example, those who view disturbing footage day in, day out may be more affected than those who work in the middle of the action, said Storm. Vicarious trauma is the technical term for this. Psychologist Sian Williams has developed some recommendations for newsrooms on how to deal with this.

Such guidelines should also be of interest to local editors, as colleagues who frequently report from accident scenes or are confronted with gruesome details when covering the courts generally receive less attention than those who are sent to crisis areas. And fact-checkers are particularly threatened online – to an extent, as Chetwynd reports, that they no longer sign their texts with their names at AFP. The non-profit company The Self Investigation has put together a toolkit on mental health specifically for this group.

For some it’s not the news that causes burnout, but the accelerated pace in newsrooms coupled with economic pressure and concerns that AI could make the job redundant – all this on top of the normal madness of family management that keeps many colleagues busy in key career years. And this is not only true in cultures where self-fulfilment and leisure time play a major role. At a change management workshop for a media company in Malaysia – I led the seminar – participants brought up work-life balance and mental health as top challenges for the industry.  

Emma Thomasson, now a consultant and previously a bureau chief and senior correspondent at Reuters, addressed the topic proactively at the news agency and met with such a positive response that she set up a corresponding internal program. Today, she is involved in the journalist helpline of the Netzwerk Recherche, which offers help to all those who feel that the stress of their job is getting too much for them.

But managers are not doing their job if they leave such offers solely to external bodies and the initiative of those potentially affected. It is important to create a culture in which employees can talk about such experiences without fear, said Chetwynd. This includes managers also showing themselves to be vulnerable. This challenge must be taken up by all those in leadership positions. At AFP, with its 150 offices around the world, that’s a lot of people, but that’s the only way it works. Chetwynd: “The only barriers to a potentially unlimited amount of work are the managers.”

Experts consider two things in particular to be important to alleviate stress: good preparation and regular breaks. Not every journalist, for example, is suited for every assignment simply because of their character and personal history. And managers should address the potential risks proactively before someone takes on a task – be it a disaster assignment or moderating online comments. Adjustment helps. AFP, for example, only lets crisis reporters go to the front lines once they have become familiar with the environment and culture in less exposed roles. And after a few weeks, they must take time off to breathe. This sounds simple, but in many traditional newsrooms as well as in start-ups, it is part of the culture to quietly let workaholics do their thing if they get unloved work out of the way or increase the fame of the brand. This may work in the short term, but in the long run such negligence can be expensive – not to mention the human cost of it. 

Media companies are generally well advised to think proactively about the current and desired corporate or editorial culture, put it in words and communicate it precisely to employees. Lea Korsgaard, editor-in-chief of the widely praised Danish news brand Zetland, presented clear principles on another Perugia panel. Everyone who joins the company gets an hour with her, “and then I explain the culture”, she said, adding: “If you want to create a human-centric product, you need a human-centred culture.” Any news organization who wants to play a part in the battle for talent should listen up.

This column was written for and published by Medieninsider in German (“Chefs, redet über eure Ängste!”) on 15th April 2025.

Don’t mind the gap: Automated translation could revolutionize journalism – but how?

Newsrooms can fight “fake news” by identifying it, warning about it and correcting it. But they can also fight it with so much trustworthy, factual and well researched journalism that it drowns out the lies. For most of them it’s not an either/or decision, of course; they try to do both. The European Broadcasting Union has recently unveiled a project that caters to the latter: It wants to deliver class en masse and will do so by scaling content across countries and languages using automated translation.

The project promises quite a bit: starting in July, ten public broadcasters from Europe will feed in particularly good pieces on globally important topics such as Covid-19, climate change and migration, which will then be translated by artificial intelligence and made available across Europe. In an eight-month pilot phase, 14 institutions had shared more than 120,000 articles this way. This worked so well that the EU is now helping with a grant. So in the future, citizens could benefit not only from more reliable information, but also from more diversity, if things go well.

In fact, automated translations could revolutionize journalism. If you haven’t struggled with texts translated by software into other languages for a while because you found the results rather unsatisfactory, you might want to try it again. Artificial intelligence, which works on the principle of deep learning, now translates texts like this one into English within seconds. With a little editing, they read – this needs to be said – much better than what one used to get back from translators who knew a foreign language but not necessarily the journalistic form. The AI products are, in the truest sense of the word, frighteningly good.

Admittedly, robots work reliably in a few languages only, but they are learning as we read. And the result will shape journalism – but in different directions. On the one hand, the tools open up new possibilities for publishers. Whereas until now only newsrooms from English-speaking countries were able to offer their journalism worldwide, in the future everyone will be able to do so for whom it makes sense commercially or qua mission. Not every media company will be able to turn itself into a New York Times or a Guardian, but the options for Europe-wide news portals are growing rapidly. At the start-up Forum.eu, for example, AI now handles 60 percent of the total translation work, according to co-founder Paul Ostwald’s estimate. The platfom makes quality journalism from different countries accessible all over Europe. 

Editors could also reach people with other native languages more easily in their own countries via automated translation, for example hard to connect with migrant communities. And international research should become much easier if reporters have better access to original documents this way. The whole thing does not only work for written but also for spoken material (which stillmakes for funny subtitles on TV).

However, newsrooms have already realized that there is not only a huge potential for expansion, but also for savings. Reuters news agency has long been redeploying resources, for example from its German-language service to parts of the world where citizens are in greater need for journalistic scrutiny. And of course this makes sense: Instead of sending a German- and an English-speaking colleague to the same press conference in Berlin, an additional colleague in, for example, the Philippines can create real added value.

However, it is precisely at this point that things become critical. After all, language is only ever a packaging for content that arises in the context of a culture. The exact same fact can read completely differently depending on who is describing it. When, for example, star conductor Simon Rattle recently announced that he would be joining the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor in 2023, German culture reporters were thrilled. Reading the British Guardian on the same day, one learned that Rattle had extended his contract with the London Symphony Orchestra until 2022, oh, and at some point he would go to Munich. One event, two reporters, two worlds, a translation would not have helped in this case.

A translation tool will not replace a foreign correspondent – but it will make his or her work easier. This is bad news for all those fixers and local journalists around the globe who make sure that journalists get the right information, contacts and access without which they would often be lost on foreign territory. If they are not needed as translators any longer, they might soon be out of their jobs. Already, only a few newsrooms can afford a network of reporters far from home. Easier access to all the world’s languages is likely to accelerate this development – but it has not caused it. 

As with many things that new technology offers, there is one temptation, and it has to be resisted: That you have to do what you can do. Translating content via AI just because it works is not a strategy. What audience do you want to reach with what content, and what do you want it to achieve? Do you have a mission, a business model, or just fun with it? There they are again, these questions that no AI can answer. Meanwhile, beware: AI is increasingly used to translate “fake news” as well. 

This column was published on 4th February 2021 with Hamburg Media School in German, then translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) and edited.