Caring for your copy and photo desks in crises
By Doug Fisher
You can't help but stand in awe of the dedication and Herculean efforts
that newsrooms across the Gulf Coast have put forth amid the devastation
of Hurricane Katrina and the onrushing Hurricane Rita.
Yet even if your newsroom is in Boise, not Biloxi, or New Hampshire,
not New Orleans, the stress and emotional distress can be just as telling,
especially among those on your photo and copy desks dealing with the
thousands of words and photos detailing the horrors and the hopes.
"You need to be taking steps to help people and not wait for
that moment when someone goes, 'Oh my god, it's too much,'" said
Ray Cox, director of editing and presentation at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Roger Simpson, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism
and Trauma at the University of Washington, calls it "the most
neglected part of caring for news staffs, either the people who are
looking at the pictures or all the copy."
"Usually no one is paying attention to what it does to your emotional
state," he said.
As Simpson noted, newsrooms, and desks in particular, often are filled
with the bravado of getting the work done, no matter the challenge.
It's what, in conditions like those on the Gulf Coast, keeps staffs
going to provide the vital public service they do.
But this is a mobile, tight-knit business where that copy editor now
sitting next to you in Dubuque might have memories of going through
a storm in Daytona. Those ties – and the sometimes-disturbing
memories – were apparent at a recent American Copy Editors Society
regional meeting in Atlanta.
"In the copy-editing world, everybody knows everybody or knows
somebody who knows somebody," said Clark Freeman, now a sports
copy editor in Atlanta. He worked for 12 years in New Orleans, and "I
still have tons of friends there."
Freeman had not handled storm stories, but said he spent "a week,
virtually all my waking hours, watching the coverage" while he
waited for e-mails from those friends. "You're just devastated,
but you have to put that aside and do your job," he said.
Holly Kerfoot, a copy editor at North Carolina's Winston-Salem Journal,
was working in Charleston, S.C., when Hurricane Hugo tore through that
city in 1989.
"Being in Hugo, I realize a lot of what I'm feeling from it is
survivor's guilt," she said.
Kerfoot said that away from work she tried to avoid the TV coverage.
She recalled reading the wires the weekend after Katrina hit "and
that was kind of overwhelming after a while, where the magnitude of
what has happened begins to sink in."
Add to that the increased workload on many desks. Kerfoot said her
paper added two full pages. Richard Luna, managing editor of California's
Ventura County Star, wrote in one of his recent columns after Katrina
that "copy editors might edit and write headlines and cutlines
for more than 50 articles a day."
"At times there is a sense of being overwhelmed, yet, time and
time again, they respond with a true sense of professionalism," Luna
wrote.
Rebecca Roper, a copy editor at The Greenville (S.C.) News, is no
stranger to such stress. She started there shortly after Sept. 11,
2001. Yet with Katrina, the pictures of the dead and the devastation
were no less affective.
"It's really hard for me to go home and sleep at night," she
said. "You think all I did was put a paper out. I didn't do anything
to help them."
At home, she tried to "read something fluffy or do yoga – something
that puts my mind on something else."
Simpson said managers must watch for indications of stress among those
they supervise: exhaustion, anxiety, tearfulness, abnormal anger and
upset stomach among them. They also need to know more about what those
people have been through.
"I think a lot of managers fail in this respect because they
don't know the personal backgrounds of the people they work with," he
said.
Cox, the Journal-Constitution's presentation editor, said everyone
has a story to tell, so let them tell it. Simpson, too, encouraged
conversation, but warned against forcing people to say how they feel.
But to start those conversations may take a culture shift in many newsrooms,
he said.
Individuals can help themselves by focusing on things in their lives
that are good and reaffirming, Simpson said. And managers can't sit
back; they must ask those they supervise how they are doing, he said.
Kerfoot still remembers how a supervisor, during the space shuttle
Columbia explosion, made a point of asking how she was doing. Roper
said her editors sometimes buy food, and it helps.
"Just an acknowledgement that they know this is happening, that
they know this is a strain on people," Kerfoot said. " Realizing
that there are emotions there, that we are not just mechanically processing
stuff, is important."
Simpson said a realization is growing that attention must be paid
to desks and the emotional health of those who work on them, especially
at times of crisis.
"Nobody had on their agenda how are people on the desks doing," he
said. "I think it's breaking down very, very gradually."
