Rural journalists struggle with stress of pandemic - Entrepreneur Generations

Ashley Spinks (photo submitted
to The Daily Yonder)

"As rural communities grapple with the covid-19 pandemic, their local newspapers work to keep them informed. But that work may be taking its toll on their mental and emotional health," Liz Carey reports for The Daily Yonder. "A recent study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Toronto found that more than two-thirds of journalists they surveyed reported being emotionally and mentally affected by covering the pandemic."

Even before the pandemic, rural journalists were often stretched thin, working nights and weekends to keep their communities covered. The pandemic has added even more stressors. That's the case for Ashley Spinks, editor and sole reporter at the Floyd Press, a weekly in a Virginia town of about 500, Carey writes.

When the pandemic began ramping up in mid-March, Spinks said she published everything she could from the Virginia Department of Health, but Floyd County wasn't getting many cases. So even though it was an important story, she didn't have enough of a local angle to have it dominate coverage, Carey reports.

Floyd, Va. (Wikipedia map)

"News turned from the pandemic to the resulting indirect impact it was having on her community. Events were cancelled. Mask debates flared up. School re-openings were hashed out by officials. Government meetings went online," Carey reports. Meanwhile, "the pandemic and government actions to halt covid-19’s spread caused division in her community. Community members lashed out at her online. Small businesses, closed during shut downs, couldn’t advertise, which caused financial strain at the paper. A spike in cases overnight led her to cancel plans for her October wedding."

The spike brought all of the emotional and mental strain of the past six months to a point for Spinks: "That’s when it came home to roost for me. Our job is to get information to people with good actionable data," Spinks told Carey. "Either people weren’t reading it, or they were ignoring it."

Spinks said the stress caused a "crisis of faith in me – what is the value of my work if people don’t want to listen to it?" she told Carey. "I would say by nature, I’m anxious. But this has been more depression. I just have this deep sadness at the way we’re treating each other. Some of the commentary I get on my stories and the way people talk to each other at public meetings… I feel really disheartened and disappointed in my small town. Small towns are not supposed to be like this."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/351fj4E Rural journalists struggle with stress of pandemic - Entrepreneur Generations

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