Making sense of Harvey: An exploration of how journalists find meaning in disaster

Abstract

Thirty journalists who covered hurricane Harvey and who also lived in affected areas were interviewed to explore how journalists make sense of and cope with their exposure to hurricane-related trauma. Baumeister’s four needs for meaning framework was used as a guide to uncover how journalists used justification, purpose, efficacy, and self-worth to find meaning in their traumatic experiences. Journalistic mission and purpose were strong drivers for making sense of hurricane coverage hardships. Justification and efficacy helped journalists reframe traumatic encounters. Self-worth helped reframe experiences as furthering career goals. The article discusses implications for news managers and journalists.

Associations among traumatic experiences, threat exposure, and mental health in Pakistani journalists

“…An unanticipated finding was that journalists who more often reported on bomb and suicide blasts reported lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. This may be the result of selection bias considering that in the existing literature, adverse events have been consistently related to higher levels of depression (Dworznik‐Hoak, 2020 ; Feinstein et al., 2014 ), anxiety (Miloyan et al., 2018 ), and stress (Feinstein et al., 2014 ). Of note, significance tests performed on the imputed dataset were less conservative than those performed on the original dataset (i.e., complete cases only), which may have been caused by a lack of statistical power; bias, as our data were not MCAR; or both (Enders, 2010 ).…”

“…( 2008 ) found a higher prevalence of PTSD among foreign correspondents covering tsunamis than among local journalists covering less extreme situations. After covering Hurricane Harvey's devastating impact in 2017, 40% of a predominantly White female sample of reporters in the United States reported increased levels of depressive symptoms (Dworznik‐Hoak, 2020 ). Furthermore, journalists working in the newsroom were shown to report higher levels of depression, intrusion, avoidance, and heightened arousal if their work involved extreme images (Feinstein et al., 2014 ).…”

Campus Coverage of An Execution: A Narrative Analysis

“…Research demonstrates that journalists experience traumatic events in their work, whether in major breaking news stories such as terror attacks or natural disasters, or in singular tragic and difficult events such as fatal car accidents and executions (Dworznik-Hoak, 2020;Freinkel et al, 1994;Newman et al, 2003;Simpson & Boggs, 1999). Yet only a handful of studies focus on university preparation of college students regarding the workplace trauma they will most certainly experience in the news industry (Dworznik & Garvey, 2019;Markovikj et al, 2022;Ogunyemi & Akanuwe, 2021).…”