By Joanmarie Kalter
Joanmarie Kalter, a free-lance journalist based in Montclair, New Jersey, can be reached at jmkalter@aol.com.

Ike Seamans, then a Miami-based correspondent for NBC, remembers the day he picked up the phone to hear there had been a break-out at an immigration detention center nearby. What he remembers next is that he forgot.

"It just didn’t register with me," he says. "The normal feelings just weren’t there anymore. Nothing was important. It was total mental numbness! Literally!"

Though he had once been an unusually productive network correspondent, covering events in Europe from his post as network correspondent in Rome and the war in El Salvador from Miami – "I could get off the plane faster than anyone else. That was my skill," he says – he had begun to wear down when he hit his late forties. "I couldn’t do it the way I was doing it before. I wasn’t comprehending the stories as sharply." Still, it wasn’t until his bureau chief, Don Browne, came rushing over to him later that day, outraged that they had missed the story, that Seamans was able to put a name to his own strange suffering. "I said, ‘I think I am burning out.’"

Journalism has always been a stressful profession – a superheated combination of intense competition, deadline pressure, long hours, and low pay, with the product of one’s labors played out in public and carrying real stakes. A lot of that is what medical researchers call "good stress," the challenge of jumping on a stimulating story and giving it your all, the kind that leads Don Browne, now general manager of WTVJ-TV in Miami, to say, "I love stress! It’s the thrill and appeal of this business."

But what can make stress unhealthy are jobs that carry responsibility but lack control – those in which a journalist must maintain high standards without sufficient staff or budget, for instance, or implement decisions with which he disagrees. Those were the findings of a survey, Editors and Stress, prepared by Robert Giles for the Associated Press Managing Editors Association in 1983. Giles, now executive director of the Media Studies Center in New York, found that nearly 40 percent of editors surveyed reported job-related health problems ranging from insomnia to alcoholism and hypertension – up from closer to 30 percent cited in a similar study in 1979.

Since then, there has been tremendous change in journalism, and there remains tremendous uncertainty. Many newsrooms are increasingly profit-driven and short-staffed at the expense of journalistic values. New technology makes it possible, as Browne says, "to do more and more and more, faster and faster and faster." And though no one has specifically measured the incidence of "bad stress" among journalists since Giles’s survey, recent related findings suggest it may be alarming.

Job satisfaction among journalists, for instance, has dropped steeply in recent decades. David Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit, journalism teachers at Indiana University and co-authors of The American Journalist in the 1990s, found that 49 percent of journalists surveyed across six media were very satisfied in 1971. That figure had slipped to 40 percent in 1982 – and to 27 percent by 1992.

Many are still happy with their work, says Paul Voakes, assistant professor of journalism at Indiana University, who more recently surveyed newspaper journalists for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Yet he found that significantly fewer journalists feel satisfied with the quality of their papers – 34 percent rated them excellent in 1988 compared to only 14 percent in 1996. More journalists than ever plan to leave before retirement – fully 45 percent. Women in particular want out – only one in five young women in 1996 said they’d stay in the field. Those most likely to cite stress as a reason for leaving were in their forties. Indeed, for them, said Voakes, "It looked like a cry for help."

That conclusion is echoed in dozens of conversations with journalists around the country: "It’s much more stressful now," says Stuart Zanger, 47, whose thirty-year career has taken him from police reporter at City News Bureau in Chicago to news director at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. "There’s almost a palpable sense of desperation out there that I don’t remember feeling ten or twelve years ago. It’s different."

Ironically, in any field, those most in danger of burnout are often "the best and brightest," says Dr. Lyle Miller, specialist in stress disorders and co-author of The Stress Solution. These are the people who are "dedicated, ambitious, idealistic self-starters – exactly the kind of people you want to hire," he says. "They work hardest to please and go the longest for the least payoff." Faced with frustration and lacking fulfillment, these workers don’t back off – instead, they redouble their efforts.

"I was the worst offender!" admits Jill Geisler, former news director at WITI-TV in Milwaukee. "I somehow thought that if I worked harder than everybody else, suffered more than anybody else, put in more time, worried a little more, that that made me a better manager . . . . I never missed a newscast . . . . I was online at home day and night, I

got h up early on Saturday or Sunday morning to log on because the rookie producer on board may not have had things spelled right . . . . That all seems admirable in a manager but could have been delegated, or even bypassed!" Geisler wisely checked out before she burned out, and last year took a teaching position at the Poynter Institute.

But journalists may be especially vulnerable. They are witnesses to an often painful and chaotic world, yet as objective observers, must stifle their own reactions to it and persist in the face of difficulties. "How am I even going to know how I feel about anything?," Ruth Hammond, now a writer at the Pittsburgh City Paper, remembers wondering when she started some eighteen years ago. "The job teaches you to ignore all your own emotional and physical needs."

And it may be doubly difficult to back off because journalists bring to their craft a sense of mission. "We’ll work any number of hours and do whatever it takes, because what we’re doing is important and valuable," says Jack Croft. Yet as managing editor of the Pottstown Mercury in Pennsylvania, Croft found himself so short-staffed that if even one person was on vacation it "became a death march," he says – not to do anything meaningful or enterprising – "just to get the paper off the floor every night."

"That mission gets exploited," he says. "[Overwork] becomes the expectation in a very competitive business where there are a hundred others who will do your job."

According to psychologists, the warning signs can include: not eating or eating too much; not sleeping or sleeping too much. Your hobbies slide; you lose your creativity. You’re hyper-aroused, you can’t focus, you feel victimized and moody. Should you press on despite these signs, and persist in pursuing unattainable goals, says Miller, you’ll reach a point of physical and psychological exhaustion – burnout.

Take heed: "Often the last to see these warning signs is . . . you guessed it, men," says David Welsh, a psychologist in Fort Worth who works with professional groups nationwide. Croft didn’t fully realize what had happened to him until he left daily journalism
in 1994, after some eighteen years, to become managing editor of Prevention Health books. "One of the first chapters I wrote [for a book titled Total Health for Men] was on burnout. I was going through the warning signs thinking, ‘Damn, this was me.’"

At the same time, however, burnout is being seen as more than just a personal problem, the blinkered vision of some overly driven individuals. It is also due to the objective demands of the workplace. "Twenty years ago, if you said journalism was stressful, the response would have been, So what? Today there’s an increase in consciousness about its risks," says John Russial, associate professor of journalism at the University of Oregon and a newspaper consultant.

One of the most devastating sources of stress is covering traumatic events. New research is just beginning to show that, untreated, it can have serious long-term effects on the ability of journalists to function, according to Roger Simpson, associate professor of communications at the University of Washington, Seattle, who recently conducted a survey on the subject. Five years ago, he says, he probably would not have been able to get it published.

Simpson surveyed 131 journalists at six newspapers in Washington and Michigan, and found that the degree of post-traumatic symptoms they described were comparable to those reported in similar studies by Australian firefighters who had recently battled a brush fire, and by Norwegian soldiers caught in an avalanche. The difference, however, was that firefighters and soldiers routinely receive a "debriefing" – a kind of therapeutic counseling to ease their distress.

Like soldiers, journalists typically experience a delayed reaction. At the time, they can focus fiercely on the task at hand, asking questions, writing down notes, taking refuge in the distance and control their job provides; they may not even know they’ve been affected. Later, however, some suffer from fearfulness, insomnia, emotional numbness, and intense, intrusive memories that bring back the full force of their horror.

"After Rwanda, it took me a year before I even learned how to sleep again," says Donatella Lorch, who covered the genocide for The New York Times. Once back at her home in Nairobi, "I remember walking to my window and seeing my gardener with a machete. I instinctively ran to other side of the room. I wasn’t even able to control myself . . . . It stays with you, yes, it does stay with you. I left Africa and had six months of darkness in my soul, a really deep depression." Keith Miller, a London-based correspondent for NBC, notes that easy air travel can make such experiences even more ghastly and surreal. When he covered Rwanda, "We left Kigali and that afternoon were at a garden party in Wimbledon. People said, ‘Where were you?’ I just couldn’t talk about it."

Yet journalists don’t need to whip across continents to be affected by the tragedies they cover. Simpson found that statistically those most likely to have trauma symptoms were those who had covered fatal car accidents. These journalists were troubled by details like the body in the car or the Coke bottle in the road in some cases many years later. Yet on small and mid-sized papers, as Simpson notes, such an assignment is a very common experience for even rookie reporters.

Traumatic stress, of course, is only exacerbated by the long hours that were legendary in journalism even before the wave of corporate buying and selling that has eviscerated newsroom resources. "The stresses are so much greater today because more and more ownership is concentrated in publicly traded companies looking to increase their profits on a quarter by quarter basis," says Jill Geisler. "As you can’t always increase revenue, you decrease expenses, and the fastest way to do that is to reduce head count."

In her case, when her Milwaukee station switched its affiliation from CBS to Fox, its newshole ballooned from three and a half hours a day to seven hours; the size of her staff rose at first from fifty-six to one hundred, but was then cut to eighty-five. "We are all trying to do way too much news with way too few people. A lot of us are running on empty," she says. The average tenure of a TV news director is now about two years, and Geisler says producers, for whom "there’s almost a bottomless pit of demands," tend to burn out within three to five.

At newspapers, the stresses can be most intense for mid-level editors. Bill Sutley cites his experience as city editor at the Hattiesburg American in Mississippi, a Gannett paper, where the pressure to keep down overtime for reporters could leave the editors, who had no such protections, wrung out. "They would hit their maximum and if a big story broke, you’re responsible. You’d have to plug the holes. That’s when it kills you . . . . Just hook me up to a Diet Coke drip and put a Merit 100 in my hand!"

Though the company encouraged further training, Sutley had no time for it. And while he averaged sixty hours a week, in today’s corporate environment, even that didn’t seem enough. He remembers doing a solid job on the coverage of a double murder but his boss was more concerned that he set up a focus group on community issues. Finally, though there was much that Sutley loved about daily journalism, he left after twenty years, taking a 50 percent cut in pay to work in university public relations.

But it’s not just budget cuts wrought by cost-conscious corporations that have increased the stress, say journalists today. The technology that often liberates them can also at times enslave them. It has made newspaper editors into page designers and systems managers whose knowledge of Quark XPress is even more important than their mastery of English, says John Russial, who studies newsroom organization. It puts them at the mercy of machines that suddenly slow down when a new software program is loaded, or freeze up at 3 a.m., giving rise to the newest of trendy terms, "computer rage."

Don Browne bemoans the stress of beepers and e-mail. "On a three-hour plane flight, you used to be able to rest, reflect, focus, and renew," he says. "Now there’s nowhere you can’t get a phone call. There’s no escape!" Online reporters must work so rapidly and relentlessly they’re essentially just transcribing their notes. At its most absurd, the new technology has tethered TV journalists onto rooftops where they may stand for hours on end feeding "live hits" via satellite – a process that prevents them from actually gathering any news.

When the U.S. bombed Baghdad last December, Donatella Lorch, by then an NBC News correspondent, had three bathroom breaks in twenty hours, so busy was she doing live question-and-answer hits with an anchor for network, cable, and allied stations. As her colleague at NBC, Keith Miller, describes it, "You are given a countdown to live, requiring a very clear head and . . ., accompanied by a serious adrenaline rush. Three minutes later you’re down. Then you’ve got to come back up again. When you do that for fifteen hours or more it can be really debilitating."

Indeed, within a few short years, technology has transformed much of the business of journalism, and what is perhaps most stressful of all, will continue to change it – and soon – in ways that no one can yet predict. In his survey for ASNE, Paul Voakes found that a majority fear for the future of newspapers – 55 percent expect they’ll be a less important part of American life in ten years. In TV news, notes Stuart Zanger, former news director of WCPO in Cincinnati, "the viewers are going away and no one knows where this is going to end." Five years ago, his station was number-one in its market with a 14 rating for the 11 p.m. news; this past November it won with an 11 rating. "Where did those viewers go?" Soon to come are multiplex digital signals and an Internet as smooth and quick as a TV picture. "There’s a lot of stress out there," he says.

But perhaps the simplest truth about stressed-out journalists today is that – whatever the profession’s new challenges – the work they found exhilarating in their twenties can be exhausting in their forties. Dale Russakoff, at 46, a New York-based reporter for The Washington Post, has been anxiously juggling her job with a family life that includes a house, a husband, two children, and an ill, elderly mother. When she returned from a week away in Littleton, Colorado, glowing with the satisfaction of having worked full throttle with talented comrades on a story of major significance, she said, "I realized it’s not just me, it’s the circumstances. I’ve been trying to do the same job at the same level as when I was twenty-five and didn’t have those other responsibilities."

Unfortunately, many journalists still won’t admit they’re burning out on the job, says Robert Giles. The culture of bravado that fans the flames also discourages them from slowing down or seeking counseling. They must be seen as war-horses, impervious to trauma, fatigue, and fear, leaping to answer the call.

Though The New York Times, as part of its Employee Assistance Program, offers a stress debriefing to journalists exposed to trauma – in which they simply discuss the experience and their feelings – Patricia Drew, its director, admits they’re initially hesitant to use it: "They’re afraid they won’t be sent out on the next tough story," she says. And while a few corporations have now begun to seriously restructure their workplace demands – Hewlett-Packard and Ernst & Young among them – Lyle Miller, who is setting up a stress management program for employees of IBM, knows of no such effort by any news organization. "The only thing they take seriously is that stress is a good subject for lots of articles" – as many as 20,000 a year, he estimates. Roger Simpson goes so far as to call it "a silent scourge."

Though it may be silent, the effects of such stress are real. How can journalists communicate what’s new and fascinating in the world around them if they themselves have shut down psychologically, Simpson wonders. Even worse, "Journalists have serious responsibilities in challenging public institutions. If they are not focused, not thinking clearly, don’t have energy – those are serious problems."

Also serious are the effects on their personal lives and health. Women, in particular, seem to bear the brunt of family anxieties. Writer LynNell Hancock says she was "burning out big time" at Newsweek, knowing her children were sometimes home alone at night while she was delayed in the office. She winces at the time she brought home pretzel boxes from the office vending machine for her children’s breakfast, not having had a chance to buy groceries. "You feel like a terrible mother!," she says. Another writer, who worked fifty-five-hour weeks while suffering with health problems, feeling she had to prove herself anew with every changing owner of her paper, finally had a life-threatening emergency. "I remember thinking before they wheeled me into surgery that I had let my job kill me and what an idiot I was," she says.

In the end, stress is driving away many of journalism’s most experienced and creative people. Stuart Zanger, who earned distinction as head of the investigative unit and news director at WCPO in Cincinnati, and who had injured his neck in a car accident, was struck when his doctor told him, "You will never feel completely well until you deal with the stress in your life." Last April, he left his job. "I was afraid that just over the next hill I wasn’t going to be able to maintain the quality," he says. "I didn’t have the strength after a couple of years of eighty-hour weeks to re-invent it. I needed to get away and catch my breath."

But for many people, there are ways to survive and even thrive less stressfully in journalism, say psychologists and career consultants. First, however, they must challenge some of their own assumptions.

Take that culture of bravado, for instance. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to say you cannot take on every assignment, that you must conserve some energy and maintain some balance, says stress specialist David Welsh. "It means you’re self-aware, realistic, and responsible with your own resources," he says. And burnout, once recognized, can be a healthy thing, adds Marti Chaney, a career consultant in Portland, Oregon, who has counseled dozens of journalists. "People are so afraid of it. But it means you’ve grown, you’ve changed, and it’s time to reevaluate."

She compares burnout to a case of the flu, when "even your favorite food like chocolate doesn’t sound good," and cautions journalists not to make radical decisions in the thick of it. In fact, they often don’t have to change much in order to have changed a lot. Chaney cites a woman at The Oregonian who felt powerless, but once she dared to ask – in this case, that she work three days for ten hours each rather than five days for eight hours – she got just what she wanted. Another, who had children, switched from hard news to education, a beat that reflected her own changing interests.

Chaney suggests presenting management with options, looking for ways to meet overseers’ needs as well as one’s own – as in "I’ll reduce my hours, but take on this . . . ." Journalists should be more assertive and communicative with their boss – whether that’s an editor or a station owner. "Yes, I’ll be glad to fit that in," Miller suggests you say, "but I’ll have to drop something else. Tell me which one."

They should recognize their job is objectively stressful, advises David Welsh. Do the obvious: maintain a nutritious diet, sleep, rediscover hobbies, make time for family and friends outside of the job, he says. Take advantage of stress debriefings – they do help, says Roger Simpson. So do support groups, whether meeting compassionate colleagues for lunch or finding fellowship via e-mail.

Don Harting, a free-lancer in upstate New York whose stress drove him to rage, feels it ultimately brought out the best in him: "It forced me to strengthen my faith and look within myself for the hard changes I needed to make." He began keeping a journal to help him identify his own feelings, what made him angry and how he controlled it. He continues to be helped by prayer, exercise, and keeping the Sabbath, he says.

Every so often Donatella Lorch says to hell with the stance of detached observer and acts forcefully on her own emotions. While stationed at the Albanian border last May, covering the refugees streaming in from Kosovo, she found a six-year-old boy ill with cancer and arranged, with the help of Italian doctors, to have him medevaced to Italy for treatment. "That helps with all the stress," she says. "One producer told me to stop playing God. Another said, ‘If playing God works, why not?’"

The bottom line for some journalists is that they may have to ease their standards. Welsh advises they give their work their best shot, cross their fingers, and let it go. As he puts it, "An ethicist may say that’s a sellout, but as a psychologist I say that’s survival."

Ike Seamans did survive, though his burnout lasted a year. "Don [Browne, his bureau chief and friend] covered up for me," he says. "He used tough love, he got hard on me but with a gentle touch." Seamans stopped drinking, exercised, and made a conscious effort to put a more positive spin on life, something he still works on today. He went on to head up NBC bureaus in Tel Aviv and Moscow and now, as senior correspondent back at WTVJ in Miami, he feels, at 61, that he’s doing the best work of his career – complex investigative pieces on biological weapons, white supremacists, affirmative action.

"I came out the other end whole," he says. It’s still a stressful profession and he’s still a hard-driving guy – in fact, he had a heart attack three years ago right on camera and kept working – but now, at least, he can finally say, "This is not only my best work, it’s the most enjoyable."

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