Reporting with emotion: A comparison of journalists' engagement in emotional labour across media types

Abstract

This study explores the process of emotional labour in journalism. In a series of one-on-one interviews, journalists reflected upon their experiences while gathering the news and agreed they do indeed engage in emotional labour, suppressing or manipulating their own emotions as part of the job at hand. However, while journalists across media share much in common in this process, this study identifies important subsets within the profession. Across the divide of print and television, journalists draw on quite different types of working practice in their pursuit of news and have markedly different mindsets and attitudes towards emotional labour, as well as relying on different mechanisms for coping with the difficulties that arise from emotional control. Our findings show that with little or no training in this practice, and with the majority of journalists achieving merely a deferment of upsetting emotions, emotional labour can have serious implications for those reporters who engage in it.