Pride and Anxiety: British Journalists’ Emotional Labour in the Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This study aims to identify and explore forms of emotional labour, that is, efforts to manage emotions that labourers perceive as experiencing in their work life, that British political journalists experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic and the perceived consequences of this labour. It is argued the examination of journalists’ emotional labour matters as it can impact journalists’ workplace wellbeing and mental health but also work commitment and quality of journalism. In order to answer the research question, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 British journalists covering politics in the spring of 2021. The findings indicate that journalists experienced a range of negative emotions working in the pandemic, with anxiety and frustration being among the most commonly reported ones but also important was the feeling of pride in their work. The inability to access established, albeit informal, support systems, tied primarily to a physical newsroom space but also other socialisation spaces, such as working on location, removed opportunities for emotion management and induced new, and often persistent, emotions of anxiety, frustration, loneliness and nervousness related to work.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalist
• emotional labour
• pandemic
• trauma reporting
• newsroom
• interviews

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for support in project’s data collection and comments on an earlier version of this paper that she received from Professor Kurt Barling.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The interview contained 4 groups of questions focused on: emotional labour in everyday work; emotional labour specific to the pandemic; emotional labour specific to work with social media; and the perceptions of support systems in journalism.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/V00543X/1.