A Typology of Journalists’ Personal Emotions. Navigating Between Useful and Cumbersome Emotions

Abstract

This article examines how journalists evaluate their personal emotions during the production of broadcast news content, treating them either as elements to be rejected or included in the story. While the concept of emotional work developed by Hochschild (1983) has informed broader research on journalists’ emotional management, little attention has been paid to the specific types of personal emotions practitioners experience and the distinct forms of emotional work they trigger. This study seeks to fill that gap through qualitative interviews with radio journalists in French-speaking Switzerland. It identifies two overarching categories of emotions. They are cumbersome when they interfere with the flow of the news production process, and are useful when they help to make editorial and narrative choices. The article explores the characteristics of each and the corresponding emotional work—either suppression or strategic regulation—highlighting how journalists navigate emotional tensions and occasionally mobilize personal feelings as journalistic tools.