The news industry has become more aware of the need to improve mental health in media in recent years. There is a greater recognition that journalism can be traumatic — both for those who cover the news and those who consume it.  

To truly care for news audiences and our fellow staff members, we need to think beyond how we practice journalism and reconsider the ways we research, design, develop, deploy, and maintain news products. This is an urgent need as news product teams increasingly grapple with news avoidance, trust, and polarization — issues that likely intertwine with past traumatic experiences with the news.

Extending the concept of care beyond the newsroom means reconsidering how we conduct user research and user testing; the potential for our news product to create stress in, and possibly retraumatize, the people who interact with them; the ways our teams work together; and whether our news product organizations are structured to facilitate trauma-informed practices across the design and delivery process.

With this in mind, Matthew Bernius, Principal Qualitative Researcher for Code for America, and Robin Kwong, New Formats Editor at The Wall Street Journal, facilitated an interactive session on “Trauma-informed news product research and development” at the 2023 News Product Alliance Summit.

What is trauma?

Trauma can show up in unexpected places. Matthew recounted a story of a user researcher interviewing cafeteria workers on behalf of a facilities food services organization. The researcher started the interview by innocuously asking, “Tell me about a bad day at work.” They expected anecdotes about angry customers, or the freezer being broken, but the interviewee instead took a deep breath and said: “I was working at the World Trade Center on 9/11….” As the interviewee recounted that day, she began to reexperience the trauma of 9/11 and broke down in the interview. 

Thankfully the interviewer had the presence of mind to create space for the interviewee to experience those emotions and gave the worker the option of stopping the interview. This story illustrates both how trauma can emerge when you least expect them and the importance of preparing for those possibilities in advance.

According to Resmaa Menakem, a psychotherapist specializing in the effects of trauma on the human body, “Trauma is a response to anything that’s overwhelming, that happens too much, too fast, too soon, or too long—[it is] coupled with a lack of protection or support.” The key thing to take away from this is that trauma is at once mental, emotional, and physical.

Trauma lives in the body and is felt differently by different people. There are different types of trauma:

• Acute Trauma mainly stems from a single distressing event. The event is extreme enough to threaten a person’s emotional or physical security. Examples include: house fire, car accident, physical assault, etc.

• Chronic Trauma occurs when someone is exposed to multiple, long-term, and/or prolonged distressing, traumatic events over an extended period of time. Examples include: long term serious illness, bullying, experiencing ongoing food or housing insecurity.

• Vicarious trauma & secondary traumatic stress stems from indirect exposure to traumatic events through stories or images. Examples include: front line workers who work with traumatized people, researchers interviewing individuals on sensitive topics like domestic violence.

• Collective trauma occurs when direct exposure to traumatic event(s) impact a group of people, community, or society. Examples include: Pandemics, living in a community experiencing ongoing violence.

• Intergenerational trauma happens when the traumas experienced by one generation are passed on to the next. Examples include: ongoing impact of alcoholism within a family, the impact of historic racism on members of BIPOC communities.

• Complex trauma is a result of exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events and/or experiences. Complex trauma can, and often does, combine any of the above forms of trauma. Examples include: domestic violence, racism, childhood neglect, childhood sexual abuse. 

Traumatization occurs when the initial experience (or experiences in the case of chronic or complex trauma) isn’t able to be processed and becomes embedded in the body. Retraumatization occurs when new stresses activate someone’s existing trauma, leading to that trauma becoming more increased and further entrenched.

Trauma is also systemic and structural. Black, brown, unhoused, migrant, trans, those living with disabilities, and other historically and intentionally excluded groups have disproportionately experienced trauma at the hands of the products, policies, services, and systems that have been created by those in power. 

How does trauma show up in our work?

During the session, the speakers and attendees collaborated on identifying some areas in which trauma shows up in journalism. 

In reporting, trauma can show up when covering tragic topics or traumatic events, especially when the subject matter is similar to the reporters’ personal experiences. The group also identified newsroom working environments as potentially trauma-inducing, especially around the pace and deadline of breaking news, and bad workplace relationships. And there is also the impact that reporting can have on communities or an organization’s audience.

In news product development, trauma definitely can show up during the user research phase. There are also news products that handle user-generated content or traumatic material, which can be traumatizing — especially to content moderators. The group also identified that product development failures can be potentially traumatic - either because malfunctioning technology could contribute to the stress of a breaking news situation, or because the failure of a news product can have a profoundly negative effect on people’s lives.  

Finally, trauma can affect not just reporters and news audiences. Attendees to the session called out that the design and development process can also be traumatic for the people building the products, especially if the process as a whole is not inclusive or the team does not get the support they need. Researchers, designers, and product owners are also participants who need to care for their own trauma too–otherwise it can be triggered in the workplace and can lead to retraumatization.

 Trauma-informed Care Principles

Trauma-informed approaches take into consideration that people are more than likely to have some history of trauma and take that into account throughout a research or design process. These approaches are intended to shift and share power while addressing the trauma that everyone involved in the process may be carrying. They are done with individuals and communities, not at them, and their ultimate goal is to prevent ongoing or future traumatization and retraumatization (and ultimately to undo the underlying causes of trauma). 

Being trauma-informed is more a state of constant becoming and growth than specifically a destination (and there are some models of the different initial steps an individual or organization can take in the process of becoming).

A useful framework for applying trauma-informed practices to product development is to follow the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration's 6 guiding principles of trauma-informed approaches. This framework was first introduced in 2014, when it was initially intended to make medical and clinical care more humane. It has since been adapted for use in a range of other fields:

• Safety: The focus is always on the safety of all involved in the process.

• Trustworthiness & transparency: The foundation of that safety is trustworthiness & transparency. It is critical that all participants understand what they are doing and any potential risks that might come out of it.

• Peer support: Trustworthiness & transparency are built through peer support. Do what you can to ensure your participants are supported when there are issues, and explore ways they (or your colleagues) can support you in the work.

• Collaboration & mutuality: All of this fosters collaboration & mutuality, which means all parties working together and receiving real value for each other.

• Empowerment & choice: When that happens, participants are more likely to feel empowered to share their perspectives and opinions and freely make choices (including the choice to withdraw consent).

• Cultural, historical & gender issues: Finally, trauma-informed approaches must be aware of and situate themselves in the cultural histories and understandings of all participants.

There are three key things to note with these principles:

1. First, they are all interconnected. Each principle supports and builds on each principle.

2. Second, they are always multi-directional and apply to everyone. They are always done “with others” and never, never “at” them.

3. The last thing is that they are fractal. The small is reflected in the large and vice versa. This framework can, and ultimately must, be used across multiple scales: at the individual level, the research engagement level, the team level, and ultimately the organizational level.

Applying the principles to news product research & development

As part of the session, the group practiced applying the principles to news product research and development by considering the following scenario:

You are the product team in a mid-sized news organization that is planning a major update to its live coverage platform. The goal is to have a comprehensive group of products, services, and processes to cover events as they unfold. (Live coverage examples: Guardian, WSJ, NYT)

The participants started with an audit by considering where trauma could come up in the different stages of the product development process: discovery, design & development, testing & deployment, and operations, for both the newsroom and for readers. Some instances they identified include:

Discovery: Trauma could come up when conducting competitive analysis and reviewing other liveblogs

Design & Development: The design of the live coverage format could be skewed towards ‘drama’ or trying to maximize the time that audiences spend with traumatic events

Testing & Deployment: Developers or testers could use traumatic or inappropriate data to test the system.

Operations (newsroom): Reporters might have to use the tool to cover traumatic events without sufficient support, and the tool may not be designed in a way that helps alleviate the stress of covering a live / breaking news event.

Operations (audience): Audiences maybe exposed to traumatic visuals of a live event without sufficient warning or context

After identifying areas where trauma may surface in relation to a live coverage platform, the group then thought in more general terms about how the six SAMHSA principles might be put into practice in relation to news products.

They suggested, for example, that news product teams could improve transparency and trustworthiness by talking through the constraints of the process/business model with research participants so they know the difference between the probable outcomes and ideal outcomes.

Or that more collaboration and mutuality could be brought into the news development process by working with experts in other fields or other identities/communities, to build better processes and ultimately better news products.

They noted that more resources could be devoted to providing peer support to people who experience trauma, for example by making it clear to people working on the live coverage platforms who they could turn to for help and support if needed.

Audiences might also be less likely to feel overwhelmed by traumatic live events if the live coverage platform provided them with more control over the news experience, so that they don’t necessarily have to follow along ‘live’ if they didn’t want to.

Evaluating progress

How would we know if we have made progress in incorporating trauma-informed practices into our news product research and development process? 

Matthew noted that evaluating success should extend beyond looking at a single project. Embracing trauma-informed principles and integrating them into the organization’s work takes time. As such, it can be more helpful to consider several stages of maturation at both the individual and organizational level.

Stage 1: Awareness - You begin to become aware of trauma and the way it is created and can manifest, specifically in the context of research. 

Stage 2: Sensitive - You start to cultivate the skills to identify trauma as it emerges, and begin to be able to identify situations that may trigger it. You start to work on actively applying the principles. A good start to this stage is auditing your existing processes.

Stage 3: Informed - With the support of your teams and organization you begin experimenting with reworking your approaches from the ground up to to integrate concepts from the core principles.

Stage 4: Responsive - Being trauma informed is now the norm for both researchers and the organizations they operate within. 

Just as trauma can be interconnected, multi-directional and fractal, this maturation process is often non-linear. Think of it as like a network of rivers and tributaries, where there are many different branching  routes one can take to ultimately reach the sea.

The journey to becoming trauma informed and responsive is not just for individuals. Ultimately, trauma responsive practices can only sustainably exist within organizations that are trauma informed and responsive. Otherwise all the responsibility for change is placed on individuals without any acknowledgement of how the systems they are operating in are perpetuating much of the trauma.

Web and Other Resources on Trauma & Becoming Trauma Informed

On Trauma Informed/Responsive Research and Design

• Many of the topics covered in this session are from the paper Cultivating Resiliencies for All: The Necessity of Trauma Responsive Research Practices by Rachael Dietkus & Matt Bernius

• The multidisciplinary Trauma Informed Design google group. The group meets on a monthly basis at noon ET every third Wednesday. Request to join the group here.

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s guide to being Trauma-Informed

• Code for America’s Qualitative Research Practice Guide

• The National Lottery Fund’s Trauma Informed Research Toolkit

• Alba Villamil’s Article about how designers can better impact disadvantaged communities and her ethical Researcher's Checklist

• Trauma responsive design foundations (a prototype)

• Psychological First Aid is an evidence-based approach to helping people who are coping with the aftermath of disasters. Some of the techniques can be useful in helping identify and have strategies to triage retraumatization occurring during a research or design engagement.

Conducting Research in Marginalized Communities

• Chicago Beyond’s “Why am I always being researched?” - A great text on research equity for those who want to do research or design interventions in communities that are constantly being researched.

Audio/Video About Trauma

• Beyond the Cliff, a TED talk by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky–author of Trauma Stewardship (see below)--primer on the need to care for all trauma, including our own.

• Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands (see below) interview from On Being.

Examples of Trauma Informed Maturity Models

• Missouri Department of Health’s Maturity Model for Trauma-Informed Organizations

• The Oregon Model of Trauma Informed Care

Trauma Informed Workplaces

• Katherine Manning We Need Trauma Informed Workplaces in the Harvard Business Review

• Campaign For Trauma Informed Policy And Practice Toolkit for Trauma Informed Workplaces

• HMNTY CNTRD’s Organizational Response To Trauma Playbook

Resources specific to News and News Products & Services

• The Dart Center’s Style Guide for Trauma-Informed Journalism is an incredible resource for thinking about how to conduct and write up results of interviews and other research projects. There are a lot of great reminders about terms to avoid and suggestions for other resources to look at when preparing to research and represent a number of difficult subjects.

• Vox’s long form on the challenges faces by Facebook Moderators. It’s an excellent example of how performing certain roles can lead to direct and indirect traumatization

Books related to trauma and trauma-informed approaches

• Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk

• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem 

• The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld, a children’s book that models core aspects of trauma informed listening.