Coping as a competency: A typology of journalists and news creators work on platforms

Abstract

This article explores how news content creators and journalists working with social media navigate their professional lives amid the volatile, entrepreneurial conditions of platformized labor. Drawing on 19 in-depth interviews, this study examines the established scholarship on coping and argues that the individual strategies these professionals use are neither institutional nor personal deficits, nor simple reactions to stress. We propose the IBES typology—Institutional, Boundary, Emotional, and Strategic—as a hybridized professional competency essential for managing algorithmic instability, digital hostility, and entrepreneurial precarity. This typology reframes the narrative of institutional abandonment. It contributes to the sociology of news production and coping literatures by documenting how these competencies and skill sets are hybrid, essential, and inseparable from “doing” professionalism. These skills are internalized and privatized as conditions and the visibility of today’s news creators’ work.