My non-fiction storytelling

 'Mental Health and Wellbeing: a Practical Guide' was published by Routledge in 2024. 

This seminal text charts the evolution of conversations around wellbeing in the journalism industry. 

But more than that, it's a collection of stories shared by high profile journalists and media experts who bravely offer their experiences as an example of the power of storytelling beyond our industry. In its pages, I also share a little of my own story, and why I chose to embark on this journey. 

Through chapters on issues including online harassment, vicarious trauma, moral injury and empathetic leadership, this book offers a message to anyone - journalist or otherwise - about why supporting people's wellbeing can create healthier cultures everywhere.  .

This report was published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and co-authored with Professor Anthony Feinstein. It looks at how journalists were affected by their coverage of the refugee crisis which reached its peak in 2015, when more than one million migrants arrived in Europe.

Through quantitative research and wide-ranging industry discussions, it marks the first time a study of this kind has been carried out into the psychological response of journalists' covering a humanitarian crisis. In so doing it became the first study to look at moral injury among journalists – finding that this, rather than PTSD or depression, emerged as the biggest psychological challenge confronted by journalists covering the refugee crisis.

In doing so, it shines a light on an important area of mental health that is likely to pose concerns for the industry, where individuals cover stories in other challenging, but non-conflict areas, or locations of post-conflict and humanitarian crisis.

It shows how moral injury is strongly associated with journalists becoming actively involved in helping refugee and it discusses how the industry needs to reach consensus on defining appropriate expectations in situations such as these.

And it concludes by offering a set of considerations for newsrooms to support those covering stories like this in non-conflict areas, or locations of post-conflict or humanitarian crisis, particularly where journalists may be covering a story local to them.

 No Woman's Land: On the Frontlines with Female Reporters is the first book dedicated to the safety of female journalists. It is a unique collection of articles written by 40 women from around the world who work in the news media. They have covered conflict, disasters, corruption and civil unrest and come from more than a dozen countries as far afield as Mexico and Burma, Russia and Somalia, Indonesia and Egypt. The idea for the book arose from the attack on CBS correspondent Lara Logan during her reporting from Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2012. She wrote  the foreword for No Woman's Land . Other contributors include the BBC s Lyse Doucet and Caroline Wyatt, CNN s Hala Gorani, Fox News' Jennifer Griffin, Al Jazeera's Zeina Awad and the former Egyptian state TV anchor Shahira Amin. The women - photographers, camerawomen, correspondents and reporters - have had their work featured by some of the world s best known media organisations and publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Marie Claire and TIME.