What else could I be doing with my journalism skills? If I could be like Mr Ben, disappear into a tailor’s changing room and come out with a new career, what would that be?
Journalism is not something anyone goes into for the money, even before the internet, so that widens it a bit. And we’re all meant to have a transferrable skills set – strengths in communications, creativity, interpersonal skills and so on. So where can you take these skills as an editor?
I’m one of the few of my cohort still working as a journalist. Most fellow editors from my early days in trade magazines are now doing other things. Where have they gone? Second careers of journalists I have known range from teaching to law.
Quite early in my career, many journalists made the move across to the world of public relations. Both professions had skills in common; you could carry your contacts over and they were sort of operating in the same world, albeit from different angles. This poacher-turned-gamekeeper move was quite a well trodden, well recognised route away from journalism back then.
Not so much these days. PR seems to have become more intensely competitive and attracting more first jobbers – young people setting out with the ambition to be in PR. They even dare to think it might be quite cool, but I’m not sure why. It may well be more attractive for various reasons, including the better pay, but it never struck me as particularly glamorous – unless you consider a spin doctor like Malcolm Tucker as PR.
Anyway, they don’t seem to need so many ex-journalists anymore. And you have to deal with journalists, although as one PR agent confided in me way back – “no, you lot are fine, it’s the clients that make our lives hell”.
If it’s more rarely PR these days, the new go-to second career for journalists, the new ‘life after editing’ now seems to be content marketing. This is a relatively new discipline and is different from regular marketing.
Regular marketing is communications of course and uses some similar editing and writing skills – but copywriting is different from journalism. And it’s a different culture. Marketers seem to spend more time in strategy meetings and stringing together the kind of buzzwords that editors spend more time editing out (world class, super-excited etc).
But content marketing, where quite a bit of marketing has gone, is more like journalism. I did some of this between staff jobs a few years back and enjoyed it. I also discovered where so many national journalists had gone. Made redundant by the digital revolution they’d then taken up the new jobs emerging for organisations to communicate more directly with their audiences, through websites or placed content. The word rates are at least double and the skill set is very similar and it’s still writing.
The biggest difference is your subject matter is more prescribed but, in some ways, you have more freedom than a journalist. I enjoyed ghost-writing thought leadership pieces because, like journalism, it’s intellectually stimulating and interesting to construct arguments, but, like social media, the anonymity can lend the writer more courage. I found myself writing comment that I’d think twice about under my own byline but if someone else wants to pay me to put theirs on it, then why not?
Plumber or therapist?
Since way back when, journalists could be heard in the pub, bemoaning their poor pay and status, and wondering, ‘maybe I should just chuck it all in… retrain as a plumber. You know I have a mate from school who earns…’. And there are a few who have actually done it.
Plumbing would certainly keep an ex-journalist fit. But the attraction was always the money. And I suspect ‘loadsamoney’ is a bit of a trade myth these days, with more competition. Editors would miss the intellectual stimulation. And they aren’t used to lifting anything heavier than a pint anyway.
There’s another, unexpected second career choice I’ve noticed emerging more recently. More and more journalists are moving into the therapy profession.
I don’t know much (or anything perhaps) about this as it seems so… utterly different. What is it about therapy that attracts so many journalists? Is it our caring, nurturing and sensitive sides that draws so many of us? Or our gentle, subtle communication skills? What is it that makes so many retrain as therapists of one sort or another and what skills do we have for it?
I put this to a broadcast journalist who’d recently made the switch and she explained it thus: we’re good at listening. No, we really are, she insisted. You have to be able to listen to your subject to get the best out of them, as well as asking the right questions. And that’s what therapists do too. You have to be interested in people.
Do these jobs offer good career opportunities after journalism? You can certainly use some of the same skills, or enjoy a higher standard of living for equally intellectually stimulating work.
But, are they future proofed against generative AI? Maybe not. AI is even getting into therapy, with more young people turning to chat bots for emotional advice. But there’s one that is, for now, safe from AI. And, yes, that’s plumbing.
I have some sort of experience of all the jobs above, to a lesser or greater degree. And plumbing was the only one I did not like at all.
I worked with a nearly retired plumber in a summer holiday job. He was known as Mad Jack because he specialised in ‘live plumbing’ – didn’t believe in switching the water off. So I finished every day soaked from head to toe. I think magazine editing was more the career for me in the long run.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
