Abstract
Working as a journalist is frequently described ‐ particularly by reporters themselves - as not a job at all but something they’re grateful to do. So why do so many media workers find themselves burned out, suffering from stress, and indulging in destructive behaviours? This is the problem that Mark Deuze sets out to examine in his new book, arguing that the health and wellbeing of those in the media and other creative industries remains underarticulated in scholarly work, and in particular the combination of stressors that are related to workload, cultures and workstyle and to people and their passion, The result is, he says, something that academics need to look at more closely
In Chapter 1 ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ Deuze outlines the multiple studies that document the deepening mental health crisis in all sectors of the media, as the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) warned of as far back as 2020, and which has been substantiated by other reports by HuffPost, the well-being initiative The Self-Investigation and the media management magazine The Fix. This is particularly true of video creators, who are trapped in the cycle of what has been dubbed the ‘relentless YouTuber life’.
Chapter 2 goes on to examine the ethical duty of care that stakeholders in creative careers have – including policymakers, owners, co-workers and even the audience. With the recent corporeal turn in journalism studies (see, for example, Wahl-Jorgensen 2026), there is a growing understanding that when journalists and other media workers suffer from mental health issues at work, ‘it is not far-fetched to suggest that this impacts the quality of our news, information and entertainment’ (Deuze, 2025, 31). Toxic behaviour in workplaces is now well-documented in the aftermath of such campaigns as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In 2022 the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) published a survey of 2000 journalists from 20 countries, which showed 41% of women said they had experienced verbal or physical sexual harassment in the newsroom. But precarity can make it difficult to complain, and added into this is the increasing role of social media that blurs boundaries of private and professional lives and can lay open media workers to intense and debilitating attacks online, as Bossio et al. (2024) note.
Importantly in Chapter 3, the author pauses to define what health, wellbeing and happiness at work in the media means. For it is certainly possible to be diagnosed with depression, but still be fulfilled at work or vice versa. As such, Deuze looks at the importance of eudaimonic wellbeing (engaging in meaningful activities and staying true to ourselves) as well as hedonic wellbeing (having fun), social connection and energy. Added to this, and something that is often a problem in media industries, is the material context of work such as fair pay, workers’ rights, safety and privacy. Deuze uses positive psychology to define health to need three necessary elements – embodied, embedded and embrained. That is: how people feel about their work, how they are impacted by surroundings and how they give meaning to all this.
Following this, in Chapter 4, Deuze lays out a narrative review of hundreds of studies, reports, white papers which have looked at well-being at work across six areas: advertising, music, film and television, digital games, social media entertainment and journalism. While each has its particular problems, the same issues recur again: irregular and long hours, discrimination, high anxiety and normalisation of burnout, job instability and low pay. Journalists can also suffer from covering traumatic stories such as war and violence. But across all industries, while the percentage of practitioners directly linking poor health to their working conditions varies over time and across professions, worryingly it never dips below 34%, and the mean is almost double that at 66%. All note the material aspects of industry practices and the affective dimensions of toxic workplaces as causing this.
The next chapter dives into how paradoxical media careers can be – that while so many clearly suffer at work for the reasons mentioned above, many express emotions of happiness or gratitude in being able to pursue a creative career. Angela McRobbie describes this as the ‘euphoria of imagined success’ (2016, 4) and the need for a performed positivity that, Deuze says, is as stressful as it is invigorating. The other paradox is of course that while there is informality in media workplaces, they remain bound by rules and are often discriminatory.
Chapter 6 builds on this to examine the significance of how media workers often talk so much about how they love their jobs – but that this can often be intensely problematic. Common themes are that people feel grateful for being given a chance to do such work, even if they are treated badly or have little control over what it is they do. As such, in the next chapter Deuze looks in detail at the three themes that emerge from the literature on creative careers – the way people talk about loving the work, combined with the precarity of doing the work and thus the way that such workers often turn to dangerous and unhealthy ways to deal with their chosen careers.
In the concluding chapter ‘Finding Joy At Work’ Deuze addresses the question of this ‘cruel optimism’ that makes people still attracted to careers in the media despite the risks that they pose and the hierarchy of influences at play. For him, the solution is for media workers to collectively acknowledge the need for fair treatment and accountability in these businesses. With journalists and other media workers embodying their labour, identifying themselves closely with their work can result in such issues being seen as individual problems rather than systematic, whereas Deuze argues that media organizations should no longer be allowed to take little or no responsibility for their employees’ health.
Wellbeing and Creative Careers is a valuable book engagingly written for media scholars to consider more closely the problems that creative industries face, and also for educators preparing the next generation of workers to understand the problems and the paradoxes that exist in these workplaces.