About five years ago, I made the switch from the newsroom to the world of communications and PR.
I remember our Tuesday status meetings with the managing partner and account directors. I would push back on the press releases, almost every single time. Not to cause trouble, but because my journalistic instincts told me they were not working. I knew that if this landed on Francis Openda’s desk, or if I pitched it to Paul Wafula, they would trash it without giving it a second look.
Their hands were tied because of client expectations. I did not understand that then. I was so green in PR.
It was hard settling in. Balancing what the client wanted to say against what the newsroom actually wanted to write about was a tension I had not anticipated. I honestly thought I would not survive a year in this industry.
But here I am, six years later, having learnt the art of writing content that works for both sides of the table.
Here is what those years in journalism taught me that no agency ever could.
You already know what the journalist is thinking
When you have spent years on the other side of the table, you develop a sixth sense. You know when a pitch is weak before it leaves your mouth. You know when a client’s announcement is genuinely newsworthy and when it is an internal celebration dressed up as public interest. That instinct is not something you can learn in a workshop. It comes from years of being the person who decided what was worth covering and what went straight into the bin. I have used that instinct to save clients from embarrassing pitches more times than I can remember. It is the most quietly valuable thing I brought with me from the newsroom.
You learn to write for someone who does not care
In a newsroom, nobody is rooting for your story. The editor is looking for reasons to cut it. The reader is looking for reasons to stop reading. That environment teaches you to be ruthless with your own writing. Get to the point. Put the news first. Kill every word that is not doing a job.
I remember rewriting a press release early in my career, cutting it from three pages to half a page, and watching a senior colleague look at me like I had lost my mind. But that release got picked up. The original would not have.
Most agency writing defaults to length because length feels thorough. The newsroom teaches you that length is just noise if the substance is not there.
You learn to make decisions when everything is on fire
A newsroom deadline is a different kind of pressure to anything an agency environment prepares you for. There is no time to wait for client approval when a story is breaking. You make the call, you file, and you live with it. That discipline, making fast decisions with incomplete information under genuine pressure, is exactly what crisis communications demands. The professionals who stay calm when a client’s reputation is unravelling at midnight are very often the ones who spent their early careers doing exactly that, every single day, for a fraction of the pay.
You learn what a real story looks like
This one sounds obvious but it is not. After years of covering real news, you develop a very low tolerance for manufactured importance. Clients will come to you genuinely convinced that their new product launch or internal restructure is front page material. Most of the time it is not. Being able to say that clearly, without losing the client, and then helping them find the story that actually is worth telling, that is a skill that takes most communications professionals years to develop. The newsroom gave it to me early and it has never left.
The tension never fully goes away, and that is a good thing.
I want to be honest about this because nobody was honest with me when I made the switch. You will spend a long time feeling pulled in two directions. The journalist in you wants to find the truth and tell it straight. The communications professional in you is hired to tell it in a way that serves your client. Those two things are not always the same.
There are still days when I feel that pull. A client wants to say something I know will not land. A campaign framing feels off. A press release is trying too hard. The journalist in me notices all of it.
But I have stopped seeing that tension as a problem. It is actually the thing that keeps me honest. It stops me from becoming the kind of communications professional who forgets what a newsroom actually needs. And it pushes me, every single time, to find the version of the story that works for both sides of the table.
That balance is the hardest thing to learn in this industry. The newsroom taught me to see why it matters before I even knew I needed to learn it.
If you made the move from journalism to communications, what is the one thing the newsroom gave you that no agency ever could? I would love to hear your story in the comments.
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