Advantageous, yes — but not in the way one might assume

What is the real value of being a journalist while also managing communication strategies for companies? It is a question that seems straightforward, with an answer that appears even more obvious. Yet it is far less obvious than it looks.

Let me explain: this is not about improper advantages. Nor about favouritism.

It is about awareness, understanding, and clarity regarding the logic and needs of a journalist.

When you work as a press office — representing client companies with the aim of building brand awareness or brand reputation, depending on the shared brief, to name just two examples — you engage daily with professionals whose job is to select news, explore stories worth telling, and shape them according to the editorial angle of the publication they work for.

The relationship between a press officer and a journalist is a cyclical one.

However, if you lose sight of this, it becomes easy to think of editors as machines performing a purely operational, mechanical task. It is tempting to assume things like, “Surely they can find some space for us.” And yet, this too is far from guaranteed.

This is where the expertise and experience of the PR firm representing the company truly come into play.

Being a journalist — specifically, having gained newsroom experience or worked as a contributor — allows you to master three fundamental and indispensable assets:

Timing, because interacting with a monthly publication is very different from working with a weekly one;

Precision and concreteness of content, because a beauty clinic is not a spa;

Language, in all its infinite nuances: tone, accuracy, choice of words.

Last, but by no means least, is the ability to express oneself: writing well, writing clearly, and building an effective narrative. This is essential.