Unprepared for Reality: Early-Career Journalists Ill-Equipped for Hostility in the Field

Scholarly calls surrounding the need to prepare journalism students for hostile encounters and harassment are emerging. Using in-depth interviews with 28 early-career journalists from across the United States, this project underscores a need for content related to hostility within journalism courses. Findings also highlighted a tension between early-career journalists’ beliefs about how journalists are supposed to act and how they coped with hostility in practice. This created hesitancy to speak up and have discussions about hostility with editors, especially among women journalists. Therefore, I argue for a shift in how we talk about hostility toward journalists in our classrooms.

Sample

Early-career journalists from across the United States were recruited for this study, defined as journalists in their first 5 years on the job post-graduation. The sample consisted of 28 journalists, all but one a reporter and the majority working at small- or mid-sized newspapers.

Main Findings

Not one participant said hostility was discussed in their journalism classes, so they lacked the knowledge needed to navigate hostility and often did not know to expect it in their journalistic routines. Despite these feelings and experiences, there was also a noticeable hesitancy to seek out support within newsrooms.

Policy recommendations/implications

The lack of hostility training participants experienced is concerning, especially because all these journalists were pursuing their degrees while former U.S. President Donald Trump launched verbal assaults on the press, and many scholars and commentators warned of the trickle-down effects of this rhetoric. Although professors should be careful not to scare students from the profession, it is their responsibility to fully prepare future journalists for the realities of the job, which includes hostility. This should be followed by strategies for responding (or not) to comments, emails, and phone calls and putting up boundaries for this particular form of hostility.