Leaving Journalism To Join The Dark Side

Welcome back to?Storytelling by Sean. I plan to use this newsletter to tell some interesting tales from my 30 years in journalism and communications, and I always welcome your feedback.

I know - yet another Star Wars analogy! You thought I'd probably exhausted them all in my newsletter seven weeks ago.

But from this point forward, I don't think we'll need any further references to the Star Wars Universe. Besides, this particular story didn't occur a long, long time ago... it started less than a decade ago, right after I wrote my last story as a journalist.

It ended up being a nice little scoop, as I'd traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia to interview Scotiabank's then-CEO and asked him about whether the Canadian government should be involved in mortgage pricing. The article ended up in many of Canada's biggest newspapers the following day.

But as soon as I returned from Halifax, I began preparing for my next newsworthy item: saying goodbye to the career in journalism that I had absolutely loved for nearly 20 years.

It should be noted, I didn't enter in to this decision lightly. Changing careers was actually the conclusion of a nearly two-year journey in which I constantly wondered what was next for me. I had been writing about Canada's financial-services sector for more than a decade at that point and while the reporting was important and meaningful, I began having "Groundhog Day" syndrome where I was writing the same kind of stories and talking to the same kind of sources, day in and day out. Often times before I'd even completed an interview, I'd have the first three or four paragraphs of a story written in my head.

It didn't feel challenging any more and I need to do something different.

My journey began by seeing if I could make a lateral move within my own organization; perhaps working a different beat or creating a new path towards my next challenge. But after speaking with several folks, that didn't seem like an immediate possibility, unless I wanted to relocate (I had a pre-teen son at that time and wasn't willing to make that move). So Plan A wasn't going to pan out.

Plan B was to start talking with competitive news agencies to see if perhaps there was a role there for me that would be new and rewarding. While the conversations I had were both positive and productive, I concluded that either the compensation wasn't close to being competitive with my current role, or that the position would largely be more of he same of what I'd being doing for the past decade.

I didn't really have a Plan C prepared, when someone innocently suggested to me that I should consider leaving journalism for the world of communications... specifically public relations. This was a move I was fairly sure I would never make, as it was ingrained in my mind that PR was very much "selling out" to any self-respective reporter. Those in the public relations industry were beholden to their corporate authorities, with no room to be creative or fun, I felt.

Pretty much everyone I spoke to in PR (including several whose opinions I strongly valued) debunked those myths; explaining the positives of the role and how, at its core, there was a lot in common between the two worlds; being a former reporter could even be seen by some employers as a competitive advantage.

I used those conversations as a catalyst to begin applying for various communications roles, including some that, looking back now, I probably didn't have any business applying to. Many of the prospective employers never returned my calls; some of them gave me interviews or set up coffee conversations to explain the role; and there were some where I finally got to the stage of being a "final two or three candidate."

But, being perfectly honest, none of those roles really felt like the perfect fit. By which I mean, I was never offered the job.

Then, in early 2013, a role came along where, not only was I wanted for the skill set I had, but I saw the role as a great opportunity to enact real change, challenge my current way of thinking and have some fun along the way. An offer was put on the table, and pretty soon I was on to the unenviable task of saying goodbye to the only career I'd ever known.

Was I nervous about it? Absolutely. Was it a career risk? Big time. There's a mentality that you can't "cross back" to journalism after becoming a so-called "flack" (and I've seen tons of examples where that isn't true).

But after speaking to so many informed people about switching over to PR, what a typical day in their shoes is like, and hearing about the doors it could potentially open, it was a calculated risk worth taking.

And if was going to take that risk, I needed to jump in with both feet, ready to immerse myself in the experience and making real impact. As a wise person once said: "Do or do not. There is no try."

Whoops - snuck in another Star Wars reference.

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