Registering in the platform is easy. Please follow these steps:
Please add the email addresses journalismcourses@austin.utexas.edu and filipa.rodrigues@utexas.edu to your address book to ensure you receive emails about the course.
For the next five weeks, you will learn:
Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
This module will cover:
Instructor: Kim Brice
How can we take care of our mental health? This module equips you with some basic theory, facts, and tools about stress and other common mental health issues and what to do to address them. You will learn how to be more aware of when your physical and mental health is at risk and how to take better care of yourself under pressure. This module will also provide you with some basic concepts that are fundamental to mental health reporting.
This module will cover:
Guest speakers:
Instructor: Mar Cabra
How can we stay healthy in an always-on culture? In this module you’ll get the facts about how digital technology could harm your physical and mental health if not used correctly. We’ll also cover why it’s essential to your well-being to set boundaries with yourself and with others in the newsroom. You’ll learn practical tips and tools about how to work remotely and how to have efficient digital communications as a team. Finally, we’ll also address the increasingly common issues of vicarious trauma and online harassment.
This module will cover:
Guest speakers:
Instructor: Mar Cabra
There continues to be stigma and discrimination around mental health issues. Within newsrooms, there’s a belief that you cannot be a reliable and good journalist if you have mental health challenges. This module focuses on what you can do to support your colleagues, raise awareness in the newsroom, and integrate well-being into company policies.
This module will cover:
Guest speakers:
Instructor: Stephanie Foo
This module describes the dangers of pathologizing mental health conditions, explores the idea that mental illness is a social construct, and suggests general storytelling practices that build nuance and empathy.
This module will cover:
Instructor: Stephanie Foo
This module delves into how we can respect and care for our subjects and their communities in our reporting process, in order to keep them safe.
This module will cover:
Guest speakers:
Kim Brice is cofounder of The Self-Investigation. She provides personal leadership coaching and mindfulness-based stress reduction and resilience trainings to a broad public, including journalists and change makers from around the world. Prior to starting her personal development work, she served as a global freedom of expression activist and later as a funder and then organizational advisor to many media, journalism and social justice support programs around the world. She believes creating a more balanced, compassionate and sustainable world starts with nurturing those qualities in ourselves.
Mar Cabra is co-founder of The Self-Investigation. She is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, digital wellness educator and Acumen fellow working on raising awareness on how technology is changing the way we interact with ourselves, each other and as a society. She writes a column in Spanish newspaper El Confidencial on this topic. She’s committed to creating a healthier working culture in journalism to prevent others from burning out like she did after leading the technology and data work for the Panama Papers investigation.
Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer, most recently for This American Life. Her work has aired on Snap Judgment, Reply All, 99% Invisible, and Radiolab. She is the author of What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. A noted speaker and instructor, she has taught at Columbia University and has spoken at venues from Sundance Film Festival to the Missouri Department of Mental Health. She lives in New York City.
This course is for employed or self-employed journalists and also for newsroom leaders, such as editors and managers, who are interested in sustaining their own physical and mental health and in reporting on mental health issues.
No special tools or applications are required.
First of all, note that this is an asynchronous course. You can log in to the course and complete activities throughout the week at your own pace, at the times and on the days that are most convenient for you. There are no live events scheduled at specific times.
Despite its asynchronous nature, there are still structures in place for the duration of the course.
The material is organized into five weekly modules, which will be released week by week. The first three modules focus on how to take care of your well-being at an individual, team and industry level, as well as demystifying key mental health challenges. They are taught by stress management trainer and coach Kim Brice and digital wellness expert Mar Cabra from The Self-Investigation, a foundation dedicated to sustaining good journalism by sustaining journalists' well-being. Stephanie Foo, a journalist and author of the book “What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma,” will teach the last two modules. She will empower you to report more responsibly on mental health issues. Each module will cover a different topic through videos, presentations, readings and discussion forums. There will be a quiz each week to test the knowledge you've gained through the course materials. The weekly quizzes, and weekly participation in the discussion forums, are the basic requirements for earning a certificate of participation at the end of the course.
This course is very flexible, and if you are behind with the materials, you have the entire length of the course to complete them. We do recommend you complete each of the following before the end of each week so you don’t fall behind:
The contents of this course will cover sensitive mental health topics. We will be covering these issues in thoughtful and destigmatizing ways, but please take care of yourself while watching the course videos if these topics are triggers for you.
A certificate of completion is available for those who meet all of the course requirements, and pay online an administrative fee of $30 (thirty U.S. dollars), using a credit card.
There's no form to apply for the certificate of completion. At the end of the course, the Knight Center team will verify all students and all activities required to qualify for the certificate of completion.
After verifying that students have met the course requirements, the Knight Center will send a message to your email confirming that you have met the requirements and are eligible for the certificate. In this message, we'll also send you instructions on how to pay the administrative fee.
After paying the fee, it will take between three to five business days for you to receive instructions via the course platform's messaging system to download a PDF copy of your certificate. The certificate is only available in PDF format.
To be eligible for a certificate of completion, students must:
There are no formal credits of any kind associated with this certificate. The certificate is issued by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas only to certify participation in the online course.