Kelsey Mesmer

My research looks at how individual journalists experience hostility in their day-to-day work in both online and offline settings, especially from news sources (i.e., the people the journalist is trying to interview for a news story). I tend to look at hostility through an intersectional lens, with a focus on gender. This helps identify safety threats journalists might encounter as they are tied to the journalists' identity. I also study resilience, and position resilience as a process journalists can enact to help them work through hostility and cope after experiencing safety threats and violations.

Definition of journalists' safety

Journalists' safety involves physical and emotional wellbeing, and involves online and offline acts of hostility. I see safety violations on a spectrum, ranging from microaggressions and professional verbal attacks (anti-media rhetoric, "fake news" etc.) to stalking and boundary crossing, online smear campaigns and doxing to sexual harassment and threats of violence and sexual assault and physical violence. I believe it's important to view hostility and safety through an intersectional lens, in which women, people of color, younger people, and those of other minoritized identities often have more frequent and salient experiences with hostility, and therefore their safety is at risk more so than their white male counterparts in the field.

Future plans for research on journalists' safety

I am currently focusing on if and how journalism instructors at the college level talk about hostility and journalists' safety in their journalism classrooms. Over 400 journalism professors from across the United States were surveyed and 30 were interviewed, with that data being analyzed and prepared for journal submission soon. I'll be continuing to focus on how journalism safety and wellbeing appears in journalism curriculum and am in the beginning stages of creating an edited volume of case studies touching on various aspects of journalism safety that instructors could use as a teaching tool in their courses. Other research will be focused on 1) how journalists enact resilience in response to hostility and 2) how newsroom editors and managers perceive safety threats and help reporters prepare for and cope after dealing with safety violations.