Journalism is under siege. Who is looking after the journalists?

Journalism has taken more than its fair share of strain. This year alone, the Washington Post axed nearly a third of its entire workforce. The BBC has told staff it plans to shed up to 2,000 jobs - roughly one in ten. The Associated Press has reduced its editorial team by 60.

Meanwhile, it is getting harder and harder to be a journalist. Disinformation and misinformation are rife, and those trying to expose widely proliferated untruths have themselves become the targets of the vitriol.

This is where MediaStrong comes in: an organisation founded by journalist Leona O'Neill in 2023, who says she was not offered the support she needed after witnessing the death of a fellow journalist in Northern Ireland. Since then, she's been leading the charge to create spaces for journalists to stay mentally strong and to better understand trauma despite the onslaught.

SEC Newgate UK hosted MediaStrong's first News Leaders Roundtable on the day of the MediaStrong Symposium. Leaders and academics flew in from across Europe and as far as Australia for preliminary discussions on inter-newsroom trauma support and psychological safety for the global news industry. Many of the world's leading news organisations accepted the invitation to attend. Now in its fourth year, the 2026 symposium, which took place in the afternoon at City St George’s, University of London, centred on collaboration: bringing together newsroom leaders, journalists with lived experience, and trauma-facing professionals from across sectors to share what really works.

The lived experience in the room was sobering.

CNN's Isa Soares, recently returned from Venezuela, spoke of what the cameras cannot convey: the stench of death that lingers long after you have left the field. She remembered a young father who spent an entire week digging for his two daughters, aged seven and ten, the same age as her boys. There was no performance from him, she said, just unimaginable love, exhaustion and grief.

People trust journalists on the worst day of their lives, she reminded the room. They allow us to witness grief most of us will never know. And then we pack our bags, board a plane and go home, carrying the guilt of leaving, asking whether we told their story well enough, whether we honoured that trust, and why we get to leave when they cannot.

The BBC's Caroline Wyatt gave an unflinching account of a career reporting from Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1999, young and - by her own admission - stupid, she hitchhiked into an active war zone because the foreign desk needed her there in two hours, and ended up looking down the barrel of a paramilitary rifle. Two other journalists were killed on that road, the same day. She covered earthquakes in Turkey and India where tens of thousands died. Her cameraman, Simon Cumbers, who had kept the whole team going, was shot dead in Riyadh, aged 36.

She also said what few dare to say out loud: that running away to cover wars can become addictive; that home life, the supermarket shop and the laundry, starts to feel trivial when half the world is on fire; and that somewhere along the way she began to wonder just how much suffering one person can witness and stay entirely sane.

Former Reuters and Financial Times correspondent, Matthew Green, spoke of hitting a wall mid-assignment, withdrawing abruptly and feeling a crushing sense of failure. The experience taught him that cultivating self-awareness is as crucial for journalists as accessing effective self-regulation tools and organisational support. One photojournalist, captured in the 2025 MediaStrong video highlights, described landing back in the UK, picking up the car from the airport, and driving down the M4 when the sensory flashbacks hit, taking them straight back to the cell in which they had been detained in Beirut.

Leona O'Neill summed up how collectively the industry needs to take greater responsibility for the cultures and practices in newsrooms saying, “It’s not just a me problem. It’s not just a you problem. It’s an us problem."

One theme came through repeatedly: journalists are still not taking up the mental health support their employers provide. Worryingly, some do not trust the employee assistance lines and are hesitant to admit they are struggling for fear of losing their place in the field. Whom they may trust, though, is a peer: someone at their level, from another newsroom, who stood in the same place and covered the same story. Whether that story was in Bondi or Beirut matters far more than whether their press card says BBC, Reuters or Sky.

That insight is now driving action. In Australia, new psychosocial safety legislation makes line managers personally responsible for the mental health of their teams, and a court reporter has already successfully sued a newspaper after being sent back into court once too often. The economics stack up too: Deloitte research suggests every £1 spent on workplace mental health saves £4 to £5.

But the most powerful case made in the room was not legal or financial. It came from two of MediaStrong's co-organisers.

James Scurry, Sky News senior producer and co-founder of Safely Held Spaces, argued, during his meetings with news leaders around the world, that we are not investing in mental health per se; we are investing in journalism. If journalists cannot look after themselves, they cannot act as a bulwark against powers that would, in his words, very easily dismantle us. Look at the US, where the dismantling of the press is getting very serious indeed.

Kristian Porter, Chief Executive of the Public Media Alliance, echoed this, arguing that the public broadcasters comprising his membership are critical in protecting democracy and freedom of the press.

MediaStrong is working towards building a coalition of news organisations to begin building more trauma-informed approaches to care for journalists, including a potential peer support network like the one currently operating in the Canadian news industry. No news organisation has yet declined to take part in the MediaStrong symposiums. And, it argues, creating better support does not need to cost the world; there is already enormous goodwill and so, it becomes about rethinking the areas in which newsrooms compete, and understanding that when it comes to mental health, a rising tide lifts all boats.