Burnout in online journalism

According to an article in the New York Times, media organizations today face many more stresses than they did even ten years ago. The pace of news distribution is much more frantic, particularly online, and as a result journalists are more likely to suffer from burnout than ever before. This appears to be the case at digital news organizations whose existence depends on how quickly it can tell readers something the competition has not. At organizations such as Politico (known for its coverage of politics in Washington D.C) and Gawker Media (an online media company and blog network based in Manhattan) the pace has led to a significant turnover in staff each year.

“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on a deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, executive director at Politico.

“Now at any point in the day starting at five in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.” VendeHei adds that not all Politico reporters are expected to work at dawn, though many staff look up to the company’s chief political correspondent Mike Allen, who is known to wake up at two or three o’clock in the morning to work on his daily newsletter.

While journalism may not be a physically exhausting job, Duy Linh Tu, coordinator of the Digital Media program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, worries about burnout in former students who have moved on to find jobs in the field.

“When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years.”

Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/media/19press.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&src=un&feedurl=http://json8.nytimes.com/pages/technology/index.jsonp