Good story, bad news: journalistic capital and occupational injury

Abstract

This narrative inquiry explores Canadian journalists’ perspectives and experiences around uncensored User-Generated Content (UGC) and trauma reporting from the digital frontline. Rich experiential data were generated through a series of one-on-one virtual interviews with four Canadian journalists. These discussions focused on topics from everyday emotionally demanding assignments involving uncensored UGC to trauma informed education, training, and practice in the field. The main themes identified were journalistic capital, the ubiquitous nature of trauma in daily news coverage, the structure of work, uncensored UGC, and lack of formal education, training, and supports. This thesis argues that UGC is changing how journalists source news material and interact with the public. With this shift comes new psychosocial hazards that must be addressed by journalism educators, newsroom managers, and occupational health and safety scholars and professionals. Bourdieusian thought was applied to the occupational health and safety of journalism and fills a knowledge gap in the occupational health literature as psychological injury is often studied in war correspondents and less so in relation to journalists exposed to psychosocial hazards while in pursuit of journalistic capital on the digital frontline.