Reframing Journalistic Resilience: The Necessity of Networked Ecologies

As violence and professional precarity intensify for journalists, resilience has become a central framework for understanding how journalists continue working under sustained risk. However, journalism studies research has largely conceptualized resilience through hierarchical models that distribute responsibility across bounded levels of authority. This conceptual article offers a critical synthesis of journalism studies research, resilience scholarship, ecological approaches, and public health prevention frameworks to examine how existing models align with contemporary threats toward journalists. We first map prevailing orientations to resilience (e.g., individual, organizational, and institutional) and show how these models can privilege episodic or reactive responses to journalistic harms and obscure gaps in coordinated interventions to mitigate violence. We then advance an ecological reorientation of journalistic resilience grounded in networked ecologies. We propose a three-part framework (individual-in-relation, collective, and networked) that conceptualizes resilience as a relational and cross-institutional capacity. Finally, we introduce public health prevention models as a translational lens for operationalizing ecological resilience as coordinated infrastructure spanning prevention, intervention, and recovery. This framework offers a conceptual foundation for studying and strengthening resilience across contemporary media environments.