Coping with Precarity: Journalists’ Strategies to Find Ease in a Professionally Vulnerable Situation
Nina Springer, Jana Rick
Abstract
In their day-to-day work, journalists have to compensate for economic system failures, which means that many of them work under precarious conditions. Worrying about the job and morally challenging working conditions create stress that journalists must cope with to continue working as journalists. Based on transactional stress and coping theory and contextualized by the concepts of moral stress and resilience, we explored—together with 27 professional journalists who classify themselves as precariously employed—how these working conditions affect them, their work routines, and their products. We uncover the factors that constitute work-related (moral) stress, how journalists manage this stress through problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies, and which factors contribute to their professional resilience, while also discussing the ideological baggage of this term. This article aims to provide both journalism education and professional journalists with strategies to improve precarious situations in a functional way.