When you’re a leader at an independent news organization, it’s easy to feel like you need to wear all the hats – or that you can’t take a day off because your audience and advertisers depend on you. 

In this episode, you’ll hear advice about how to identify burnout in yourself and your team — and what to do about it – from two experienced news leaders:

• Ryan Belmore is the owner and publisher of What’sUpNewp, a LION member publication in Newport, Connecticut.
• Naseem S. Miller is a reporter at The Journalist’s Resource, where she writes about health and medicine.

Other resources:

⚒️ Lead a “work redesign” in your newsroom. This American Press Institute guide shares advice for how to prevent burnout among newsroom managers.

🏖️ Figure out how to take a real break. When LION members turn the lights off for a month or longer to catch their breath, they almost never regret it. Last year, we talked with Gabe Schneider and Janelle Salanga about their decision to stop publishing new content for the summer as they prepared for a new phase of growth.

❌ Decide what you’re going to stop doing. You can learn more about the “stop-doing list” and other strategies for preventing burnout by reading this slide deck from the Independent News Sustainability Summit, as well as this thread on Twitter.

🎓 Take a course on addressing and avoiding burnout (for LION members only). This self-guided News Entrepreneur Academy course is led by Sushil Cheema, a journalist turned executive coach specializing in burnout and self-care, professional development, interpersonal relationships and communication.

News Guest is hosted by Candice Fortman and produced and edited by Jenna Spinelle, with editorial support from Ben DeJarnette.