My first job out of university was as a journalist at Kompas.com. I spent those months learning a discipline that has never left me: get the facts first, get them right, and get them out before the deadline. I still remember chasing a story on the Kalijodo closures — one of the most-read pieces I’ve ever filed — and feeling the strange satisfaction of a hard-won sentence.
I didn’t know it then, but that newsroom instinct would become the most valuable tool in a career I couldn’t have predicted.
The move to the other side
I crossed over into public relations, and eventually into agencies and in-house teams. On the surface, the job flipped: instead of asking the questions, I was helping organisations answer them. But the fundamentals never changed.
Journalists want the truth, fast, in a form they can use. So do regulators, customers, and your own employees. The job is the same everywhere: find the honest version of the story and remove every obstacle between it and the person who needs to hear it.
That’s why I’ve never really felt “in opposition” to the media. I’ve sat on both sides of the pitch, and I know exactly what makes a story run — and what gets it killed.
What the newsroom gave me
- A bias for clarity. If a sentence can be misunderstood, it will be.
- Respect for deadlines. A perfect statement that arrives too late is a failure.
- Comfort with pushback. Ask the uncomfortable question early, while you can still act on the answer.
I went back to study too, completing a Master’s in Communication Management, because I wanted the theory behind the instincts — the frameworks that separate a lucky campaign from a repeatable one, and measurement methods that let you defend your work in a boardroom.
What the boardroom taught me
Strategy is not the opposite of storytelling. It’s what gives storytelling somewhere to go. A great narrative with no objective is a campfire story. An objective with no narrative is a spreadsheet. The craft is holding both.
Eleven years on, I still start every engagement the same way a reporter would: what’s the story, who needs to know, and why now?
The tools changed. The discipline didn’t.
If you’re on the fence about crossing between media and communications — do it. The people who understand both sides are the ones everyone wants in the room.