Care awareness in newsrooms

Session Host(s): Luisa Ortiz Perez

Participants:

  • Steve Dubb
  • Jingyao Yu
  • Purva Indulkar
  • Emily Bango
  • Luisa Ortiz Perez

Defining care awareness:

  • Duty of care in the non-profit (legal)
  • Do no harm and do more
  • Positive notion of care
  • Organizational care 
  • Operate as best you care in the benefit
  • Collateral effect
  • Prioritize the organization instead of the individual
  • Alignment with the collective interest
  • It does not always have to be a punitive resolution
  • Ex. Human resources, performance improvement plan
  • 30 day improvement plan
  • Setting up people for success
  • Compliant way with HR
  • As long as you want to be here
  • Diversify the staff and structure 
  • What resources are out there and practices
  • Punitive, fear and retribution
  • Weaponization of care
  • Power dynamics

Care for the organization vs. care for the individual:

  • Community table in an institutional 
  • Access to peer support systems
  • Recognition of illness as another condition of the worker not a failure
  • Racial components? Who has status in the organization and why?
  • Union vs. idiosyncratic 
  • Dedicating your life to your work
  • Overwork and asking for too much
  • Taking advantage of the system AND accountability
  • Different forms of contribution
  • Qualitative and quantitative productivity – give value to impact; revenue and funding
  • Quality impact that generates change 

Tensions:

  • How do you set up so everyone have equal access to the structural support to be set up for success
  • Additional emotional labor, tapping out.
  • Confusing boundaries between person and professional
  • Two dimensions: the organizational culture vs. the legal benefits
  • Emotional Gaslighting…..support and unhappy performance, lack of honest feedback
  • Compliment sandwich
  • Binary understanding bad capitalism vs. good doers 
  • Women of color and mothering that is weaponized
  • Inequitable workplace relations…

Disposing of:

  • Not shaming people when they need a break
  • ‘Expected to be available and online, even if they are in a mountain or camping
  • Social media and cancel culture leads to self culture
  • Nobody is born woke
  • Toxic positivity
  • Conclusions
  • Structured worker representation
  • Empathic budgeting – budgeting for care
  • Let’s be ok with discomfort
  • Communities of practice where different conversations and power conversations