Finding My Professional Tribe

I am in a reflective mood, not because it is the start of a new year or a new decade, but because a big part of my life and my Sir Izacat Mewtonwife’s life – our beloved Sir Izacat Mewton, a big cuddly tom, passed unexpectedly right before Christmas. We just buried him, and we are grieving. He was 10 and a half years old, far too young, and this more than anything in the calendar is pulling us back through a decade of memories with him and our lives together.

Ten years ago, we went to Lanzarote for New Year’s. I was still at The Guardian, serving as the digital research editor, and I hadn’t yet decided to take voluntary redundancy, a buyout.

The first 10 years of this century had been an amazing decade for me professionally. I started it working at the Washington bureau of the BBC, and then after blogging the 2004 US elections, I transferred to London to write a strategic white paper for the BBC on how it should respond to blogs and podcasts. And in 2006, I left the BBC to join The Guardian.

I was often restive during this period, trying to find a way forward professionally in a world where digital journalism career paths were about blazing new trails but didn’t have a clear or clean progression.

Kevglobal Goes Global

Not long after the New Year a decade ago, I decided to take VR (a buyout) from The Guardian. I didn’t really have a plan, but I wanted the freedom to explore. And over the past decade explore I did. I spent a good chunk of the last decade building my own business, working with dozens of media companies and non-profits in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. I trained thousands of journalists in digital journalism skills including social media, data journalism long-form storytelling as well as audience development and engagement. I worked with Al Jazeera journalists before and during the Arab Spring, and in one of my proudest moments, I worked with Tunisian journalists as they prepared to cover their first free and fair elections in three decades in 2011. I was a guest lecturer at Oxford University and LSE, and in 2017, I wrote a report on innovation management at media companies for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford.

In between working for myself, I held various full-time positions, as an editor and digital strategist with the Media Development Investment Fund, as a regional executive editor for Gannett and now as a digital managing editor with ideastream, a large regional public media group in the US.

Even friends said that I didn’t seem to have a sense of what I wanted to do. I have always wanted to create the future of media. But as for so many journalists over the past decade, my different jobs weren’t so much of a career journey as they were a forced march. With the changes in media, roles simply weren’t durable. In my last role in newspapers with Gannett, I joke that I survived the first six rounds of cuts in the 21 months I had my role but not the seventh.

With my current role in public media in the US, I have finally had the gift of stability, and I have had the opportunity within my role to plot a future. It has given me time to think about what I want to do and where the most exciting and promising future lies for me.

Over the past decade, I have discovered an entrepreneurial passion and drive that I didn’t know I had, and I have become fascinated with not only product development but also with organisational dynamics. How can I help the organisations that I work for manage change? That has been one of the constant themes of my work, and I hear it from my team at work and the teams that I have worked with during my consulting.

This is what I want to do: Develop products for changing markets and help companies re-orient themselves towards these new market opportunities. I have been developing products for more than a decade, but I know I need new skills to help organisations adapt. That’s why today I’m starting a master’s degree with the University of York in innovation management and leadership. I’m so excited to be able to do this while I continue working. I’ll be learning new skills and also being able to apply those skills in my day-to-day work.

Career Pivot: The first step

It’s coming up on two years since my job as a regional executive editor and news director disappeared, one of the tens of thousands of US newspaper jobs that simply doesn’t exist anymore, and I’ve been waiting to write a post about my job search because, I’ll be honest, I wanted to write the post announcing that I had landed a really cool job. I have got close a couple of times, but I can, in all honesty say, the jobs just weren’t right. And this time, I want the job to be right. I want the best culture I can find and also something that feels a bit sturdier than the full-time roles I’ve had since I took the buyout from The Guardian in 2010.

And so I waited to write about the job search, which is really more than a job search. It’s a career pivot. That’s the other reason I haven’t written about this process. It’s not that I’m committed to leaving journalism, but it is the realisation that journalism most likely won’t be able to provide me with enough stability to enjoy the most important things in life: My wife Suw, family and friends.

That’s not to say that I don’t have ambitions. In the last two years, I’ve built and expanded on the international media consultancy work that I started after I took a buyout from The Guardian in 2010. I’ve worked in a dozen countries in 2017, providing digital transformation, data and long-form journalism workshops to journalists across south and southeast Asia. I’ve been doing some really incredible and satisfying work with the newsrooms of Trinity-Mirror in the UK, helping staff and editorial leadership turn their analytics into editorial action and launch new audience engagement initiatives. And I produced a report on newsroom innovation management for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford.

My consultancy has given Suw and me the space to explore this career pivot. I had already started to think of a pivot the summer before the job disappeared. I knew that it was coming. I was heavily involved in the restructuring that led to it being eliminated. But when the role did go up in smoke, people who I spoke to asked me what I wanted to do next. There was a part of me that wanted to answer that I wanted to do what I had always done: Create the future of media. But I knew my digital skills, my data-driven creative passions could be used in a number of other ways, and realistically, it was time to update my personal mission statement.

The summer before the job went away, a good friend told me that I most likely wouldn’t find the kind of job I wanted in a major media organisation and suggested that I look to media start-ups. And that is one avenue I’m exploring, and if you’re a media start-up looking for a crack audience development or head of product, get in touch.

Another friend identified said that I had a passion for communications and community, and I’ve definitely been rolling that idea around in my head. I like this idea. Journalists are driven by a mission, and I would love to talk to people about other public service missions that I could support.

But this is a good first step. When I started blogging with Suw back in 2006, the blog was part of a brilliant community of writers, journalists and “social technologists” as Suw often describers herself. I loved that time because blogging really was social media, and it wasn’t just about the writing but also about the community of support that I felt. By not writing about this important transition, I’ve really deprived myself of that support.

So I’m doing something I rarely do, I’m writing something that feels half-finished, something that doesn’t feel definitive or even all that confident. But I know that I’m still writing this chapter in my life. It is unfinished, but to start the next chapter, I need to do this, write and re-connect.