‘Journalism is already hard enough’

Becoming the editor of a campus paper is daunting. Student journalists are signing up for long hours of hunching over proof sheets, managing staff and making tough coverage calls.

Drake White-Bergey expected all that. What he didn’t expect was the harassment. 

White-Bergey, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, just ended his tenure as editor-in-chief of The Daily Cardinal, a nonprofit independent student newspaper. During his months in office, he told me, harassment was something he had “come to live with and work around.”

The most extreme case came around the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 after a Jewish student rally in support of Israel. 

Before the article even landed on White-Bergey’s desk for edits, a draft was somehow circulating outside the publication. A member of White-Bergey’s staff was receiving texts related to the piece and, in an effort to answer any questions, White-Bergey told the reporter to give them his phone number. 

“After they got my number, I received a very long text message that was calling me antisemitic and threatening to post my information online and threatening to get higher organizations involved,” White-Bergey said.

The situation died down, but it could have just as easily escalated. It is time to properly equip student journalists to cope with harassment rather than leaving them to deal with stress and trauma they have not been trained to handle. 

In a survey of nearly 12,000 working journalists in 2022, the Pew Research Center found that 42% experienced job-related harassment or threats at least once during the previous year. That number is even higher for some groups, especially internationally. For example, a UNESCO survey showed 73% of women journalists had faced online threats.

A study by Northeastern University confirmed harassment is also a problem for students. Student journalists are being harassed by members of the campus community — even university officials. They’ve been insulted, called names and received abusive comments.

As a recent graduate of journalism school, I don’t feel as prepared as I would like to address harassment I may face in the field. While in college, I worked for a professional news outlet, led a student newspaper, and took many journalism courses. Based on my experience as a real-life student and my reporting for this project, here are three suggestions for schools.

Introduce the topic early 

Between lectures on event reporting and AP style, journalism schools should add discussions on harassment to introductory journalism classes. Introducing the topic early can help students feel more prepared when they start working.

Many schools do an excellent job of placing students in newsrooms early, but with that comes a responsibility to prepare students for all aspects of working. 

“Something that journalism schools can do better is having these conversations before this happens to a student — being proactive about what harassment is and what their resources may be,” said Jackie Alexander, a past president of the College Media Association. 

I saw this firsthand. At 19, I was working full-time as an intern at a regional news site, producing up to five stories a day. While I was lucky that any negative emotions readers felt toward me never escalated to the point of sustained harassment, I vividly remember some of the hate mail I received. I was called a variety of slurs, told I was worthless and told to go f- myself more times than I can count.

I knew that was a possibility in my job, but I wasn’t ready for that reality. More conversations and resources in my freshman year of college could have made those first emails less shocking. 

Teach students how to identify harassment

The first step toward combating harassment is identifying it. Where is the line that, when crossed, certain treatment becomes harassment? What is considered “normal”? At what point should a concern be raised to editors?

These are all questions I discussed with my peers while in journalism school. Unfortunately, none of them have black-and-white answers that can be easily incorporated into a lecture, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be addressed. 

It is important to provide students with examples — both extreme and more mundane — so they can recognize harassment out in the world.

Addison Schmidt, a Boston University journalism student, compared it to professors’ teaching students how to approach editors regarding edits.

“I think a lot of the fear comes from being afraid to stand up for yourself, especially with the nature of journalism right now, like so many people are getting fired and laid off,” Schmidt said. “When things are getting shuttered, it's like, you don't want to make a single wrong move. So that's obviously going to perpetuate this thing of silence where even if you are being harassed, you're afraid to say anything.”

Compile resources for students

This is probably the most straightforward recommendation. Every journalism school should have an established list of resources for its students.

Beyond a simple list, journalism schools should have a specific protocol in place to deal with instances of harassment. Jody Santos, an associate teaching professor of journalism at Northeastern University who worked on the study mentioned above, suggests there should be at least one person on staff trained in how to handle harassment and available for support as needed. 

Here are a few resources I have come across in researching this story, which can be taken as a starting place for any continued plans:

I don’t pretend to have all the answers about how journalism schools should be handling this. What I do know is I wish I had been better supported and prepared for graduation in this respect. 

I don’t believe it is intentional ignorance on the part of any journalism school or professor — everyone I spoke to during this project understands the issue and hopes to address it. During my senior year, for instance, we spent a week in our capstone journalism ethics class learning about harassment. Nevertheless, it’s time to move beyond acknowledgement and discussion toward concrete action. 

If young journalists are being driven away from the field before they even graduate college, who will build the future of journalism? Journalists and professors should recognize the importance of recent graduates to the news ecosystem and step up to support them.

“When I hear about harassment, particularly for young people, who are just starting out, it's really concerning, because it will turn people away. Journalism is already hard enough,” Santos said. “I really think that we need to be doing more about it.”