Dear Coach,

I feel depressed, disenchanted, disengaged. I am questioning whether I should stay in journalism. My newsroom is half the size it was a year ago. My editors are so overwhelmed they can’t give reporters feedback. We’re doing zero innovation. We’re just treading water. The truth is I feel trapped. What should I do? A new job? A new newsroom? A new career? Help! —Three D

Dear Three D:

First of all, you are not alone. I hear this wherever young journalists go. It was the topic of our recent Florida reunion with CQS program Co-founder John Quinn. Bottom line: How do you survive this unsettling time in American newspapering?

Please try these tips, for starters:

1) Separate out your day-to-day work as a journalist from the larger free-floating anxiety hovering over us all:What’s to happen to newspapers? The answer to that question is, simply, no one knows. Will we even have newspapers five years from now? Don’t know. Neither do the experts who spend a lot of time and money trying to keep ahead of the eventual answer. Letting yourself get sucked into that great uneasiness is a certain recipe for depression or hopelessness or feeling trapped. What you describe in your question to the Coach is being sucked into the Big Anxiety. Don’t do it. It will literally suck you dry.

2) Focus on you and on what you can do today. Not tomorrow, not next year, but now, with this story, this photograph, this interview.

3) Ask yourself these questions every day: Are you writing for a living? Are you creating stories in words or photos about people’s lives, about your community? Are you touching people, changing their circumstances, making them see in new ways? How lucky and blessed you are to be able to do that!

4) If you can do no. 3 above – just write or create a story every day, one day at a time, striving for excellence at each turn of a phrase – then you will start to live in the generative spirit of creating rather than in the life-sucking spirit of dread about the future of newspapers. This is hard to do. It takes daily vigilance. It takes reminding yourself to do it, every day. Surround yourself with people who create, not with people who complain and question and promulgate fear.

If you follow these tips, then I think you will see a change. Maybe not in newspapers or your editors or the industry, but in you. After all, that’s the only thing you have any control over.

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