We know we need to invest in health benefits, time off, and comprehensive training for our journalists covering the most difficult stories — particularly with the increase of visual content being handled by reporters and editors. But too often, we open our tool kits only after a crisis.

In the wake of January 6, several tough years covering covid, an ongoing epidemic of gun violence in the U.S., and violent wars in Europe and the Middle East, The Washington Post started to explore creating a more comprehensive way to support our staff.

This fall, we launched a pilot peer support training program for our newsroom in concert with Cait McMahon and Bruce Shapiro of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia. They have long been a trusted partner of the Post. (We worked with them to thoughtfully approach how we reported “Terror on Repeat,” in particular how we handled image review: allowing us to conduct groundbreaking journalism while being mindful of staff mental health.)

Organic peer support is the exchange of support, assistance, and encouragement between colleagues who have undergone similar experiences — in the field, on assignment, at the desk. Our peer supporters are trained to have better conversations with their colleagues — offering evidence-based tips for handling tough assignments.

Increasing our skills around talking about the compassion, rigor, and experience needed to cover the toughest stories will make a difference in improving newsroom resilience, wellbeing, and journalism craft.

We quickly realized peer support networks already exist in the newsroom — if anything, we’re investing in a practice most of us already engage in. In many ways, peer support mimics the skill sharing and experience transfer journalists engage in every day — partnering with colleagues to produce cross-discipline reporting that holds power to account. Our training builds on these natural practices and skills up our colleagues on how to offer appropriate support.

In what we believe is a first for the industry, we have created a peer track for editors. This means that in addition to training those usually associated with the role of reporter (reporters,  photographers, and videographers), we are also training a cohort of editors and producers who assign and run teams covering these stories.  Their training is identical to reporters, but creates space to address that editors face a second layer of responsibility — both to the story and to their teams covering it.

The coming year will be the pilot year of the program. There’s a lot to learn, but we are heartened by the early signs that investing in training up our staff to have focused, intentional conversations about our work creates a foundation for a healthy, resilient newsroom.

Investing in supporting the mental health and resilience of our journalists must continue to take on new forms — peer support should be one of them.