HT Brunch Mental Health Cover Story: Lessons of the pandemic: prioritise family first, writes Faye D’Souza

After working 16 years in television news, I had learnt some hard lessons. TV news is a medium that has no respect for weekends and public holidays, it is a 24/7 monster that needs to be constantly fed. Fed with the human sacrifice of interns, desk writers and reporters, who are tasked with the impossible job of making each piece of information seem earth shattering, the job of making each hour of news more exciting than the previous. The job is unforgiving, it eats into time with family, it eats into weekends with friends, into vacations. TV journalists are constantly checking their phones out of fear they might miss a message or an assignment or a tip that something important has happened. The environment is high-octane, very often abusive on, and off the air. I’ve seen very talented young people burn out and drop out of the profession because of it.