Rebecca Buckman: I was laid off from Forbes as a result of the ‘09 financial crisis. The one layoff of my career. The irony was that I’d come from The Wall Street Journal after Murdoch bought the paper, and I think the Journal was better positioned to handle the economic volatility than Forbes, which was still a family run company.

Quentin Hardy: You don’t strike me as the kind of person who shocks easily, but was it hard to be laid off?

RB: I could see the writing on the wall, but it was still a big blow to the ego. Maybe not so devastating because I’d spent a big chunk of my career at the Journal, 10 years or so, and I’d only been at Forbes for about 16 months.

QH: How did you think about your next move?

RB: The first thing was to negotiate my severance. Then I thought about what to do next: Some form of research, maybe, or work for a think tank. I talked to a friend at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I thought briefly about going into public relations, but in 2009 a journalist going into PR or marketing was not as acceptable as it is today. I also had a toddler I wanted to be with.

When you’re in that situation, everybody will give you one meeting. Everybody will have coffee with you at least one time when you leave. I really encourage people who are leaving to take advantage of the network you have. Journalists have unbelievable networks of people, because they’ve interviewed all the movers and shakers in their market, sector, whatever. It’s a seriously undervalued attribute.

Eventually I decided I’d hang out my own shingle and be a messaging, branding and content consultant for a while. I had been covering venture capital and tech startups at Forbes, and venture was the last beat I had at the Journal. So I basically just went back to a lot of my sources.

QH: How was it, getting started?

RB: I got some clients, started figuring things out. They were interested in branding, messaging, and positioning themselves in the market. These are all communications jobs, with a lot of reporting underneath. It was still telling stories.

Early on, a company wanted a brand audit, a way to figure out how they appear to others. I interviewed all their key stakeholders, the customers and partners and investors, like in my journalism days. Then, instead of writing a story full of conflict, I presented them a deck and told them how they were perceived by all these core audiences. From there, if they wanted to achieve this next goal, whether that was to continue to expand, or to raise a new fund, or expand into a new business, I gave my recommendations for what it would take to communicate that well.

The surprise to me was that they then wanted me to execute on this plan. I was like, “I’m not a PR person,” and they countered that I understood their market position, and they wanted me to do it. So I figured I should, and they wound up being an anchor client for a couple of years.

QH: Did they want you to write stories and try to place them?

RB: Contributed content was not as common then, though I did do some ghost writing for people’s blogs that might get picked up in TechCrunch or VentureBeat. I would redesign websites and work with the website person to come up with all the copy and the messaging and the positioning for clients on their website. I would organize a press dinner where the partners could speak with reporters. I liked the brand-audit stuff the most, which was very similar to reporting.

QH: How was the actual running of a business for you?

RB: What I found most difficult about being a consultant was finding the optimal mix of work, the right number of clients and flow of work so that I was busy enough, but not too busy. I usually wound up being busy or slightly busier than I wanted to be because I was nervous that I wouldn’t have enough business. Still, I wasn’t going 80 hours a week or anything, I had another baby while I was doing it, and I made more money than I had as a journalist.
The business part of invoicing people, chasing people to pay you, figuring out how much to charge – there’s no training for that in being a journalist. It’s not easy when it’s 10 PM and you’re doing invoices on the couch with the TV on in the background. My husband, who is a real business guy and has an MBA, told me I should charge more, which was difficult to do.

QH: Just as I was leaving Google, and asking all kinds of people what I should charge for different kinds of things, somebody told me a great line: “Until you get turned down, you don’t know what you’re worth.” It’s really hard, because people aren’t good at finding that boundary area, particularly if they’re not used to it.

RB: Exactly. Exactly.

QH: Anyway, you figured it out. Why did you move to Battery?

RB: I wasn’t looking, exactly. They needed a person to run their whole marketing program, and I got a call. Honestly, at first I didn’t think it would work out, but as I met the people at the firm and we outlined the job together I was won over. I had a boss, but I’d be the sole owner of marketing and have an opportunity to hire a team and lay the groundwork for a lot of new initiatives. That meant there was a lot of opportunity.
I did one of those brand studies, interviewing lots of entrepreneurs and other VCS and people from companies that Battery had exited, and then I presented it, told them how they were viewed and how to get better positioned. They struck me as a really good firm with nice, interesting people who listened to my ideas.. They had a humble East Coast culture, which meant they were probably under-marketed, and needed to raise their profile to reach their goals.

It’s been 10 and a half years, so this is now a very established marketing program. I hired somebody about a year later, and now I have three people on my team. We have a lot of agencies and consultants that we work with externally. And, I have a lot more control over my life.

QH: Looking at your whole experience, four years as an independent consultant and a decade running a marketing program, what were the foundational skills that came from journalism, and what were the most important things you had to learn?

RB: The core skill from journalism was not simply investigating, but fact-finding overall. Gathering information, but also synthesizing many conversations with lots of different people, and deciding where they fit in. Then having the distance to judge it independently, which is critical to figuring out what you need to do.

I often view my job as a translator in that my team and I make complicated technologies understandable to a broader audience, but also attractive to analysts, journalists, and other specialists in the field. Writing for the Journal was like that. I’ve redesigned the company’s website twice, which is an exercise where you have to distill the firm’s brand into a few tight sentences and paragraphs, written in a way that satisfies everyone across the firm and speaks to all the company’s core audiences. It’s the same with some of the companies we’re investing with; often we have to help them radically simplify their stories and positioning.

QH: What was the important learning?

RB: Working in journalism, meetings are something you sometimes laugh about. Reporters don’t think they need to be in any meetings, since your job is about being out in the world, on the phone, reporting. But gathering consensus for things inside companies is critical to getting anything accomplished.
You can’t just go out and do your work, then present it cold at a meeting. What I learned the hard way is that you have to go around and individually approach all the stakeholders beforehand, making sure to get their buy-in and incorporating their feedback ahead of the meeting. And then when you do offer your recommendations, you’re pretty much assured that you’re recommending something that has a high likelihood of being adopted.

QH: It seems to me that VCs tend to be high achieving, confident people. Alphas. What’s it like dealing with a room full of those?

RB: I actually don’t find that very difficult. You do it in journalism too. I interviewed Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. And I find that if you’ve done your homework, high-powered people don’t mind if you politely push back on them. At this firm, anyway, that is respected. People here are very smart, but as I mentioned, there is humility too. It’s not worth working with people who are not like that.

QH: There are some VC firms out here that are notorious for cycling through communications people.

RB: Battery isn’t like that, but I also really put my nose down and did a lot of good, substantial work even before I started. You definitely want to start on a solid track. Anywhere, your reputation is built in the first few months or a year.

QH: What advice would you give a journalist who is thinking about getting out, or someone who is newly laid off?

RB: One, don’t believe that your sole skill is writing. Too many journalists immediately go in-house as a content producer, or they hang out a shingle and become a freelance writer. Writing is certainly one of your skills, but quite possibly not your most marketable or potentially lucrative one.

Two, go have coffee with everybody. You have a network of very high-profile sources and contacts. Talk to those people. If you were good and fair to them as a journalist, they respect you and probably have some good ideas about what else you can do. They might even know a company or firm that they’re connected to that needs a little help.That’s a great confidence booster.

Third, don’t be afraid to experiment when you first leave. The first thing you do in the six months you leave journalism may not be the thing that defines you for the rest of your career. You might want to hop around a bit. Try things, there are a zillion things, from writing a book to working for a nonprofit to researching for a hedge fund or marketing a VC firm.

The big problem is that hiring managers often don’t understand the skills journalists have, so you need to figure out quick, effective ways to communicate everything you can do.

You might look for somebody to help you with your resume, as journalists leaving the profession are generally horrible at that. It took me forever to figure out that nobody cares about the award I won from the Newswomen’s Club in New York for my story about whatever. Say you’re an “award-winning journalist” if you want, that’s all.

QH: What advice would you give managers hiring journalists?

RB: Realize the journalist can be a huge asset. They have a lot of skills that you probably aren’t anticipating. They read people well, since all those interviews make them good at spotting when someone is lying, or scared, or really enthusiastic about something. They usually have EQ on steroids, and in the tech world there’s a lot of EQ deficiency.

You should understand that this person has probably not worked in a regular corporate environment before. They may be difficult to manage at first, so set extra clear expectations with them about what the role is, the goals that they’re supposed to meet.

Journalists are not used to terms like “KPIs” and “OKRs”. They’re not necessarily hostile, they’re just in a new space, coming from a job where there was a lot of personal autonomy.

The other important thing for hiring managers is to understand that journalists thrive on drama and conflict. You’ve got to make sure they understand that in general, functional workplaces are not driven by conflict and drama because that’s a recipe for disaster.

QH: How is your relationship with traditional journalism now?

RB: PR and earned media is a relatively small piece of our marketing program. That may be a result of my perspective as an ex-journalist who has seen the industry fall apart in many ways. A lot of Battery’s work is in B2B, or technology in which one business sells to another. It can be pretty wonky, dealing with dry subjects which the great Wall Street Journal editor Don Clark would call “boring but important technology.”

QH: I love Don like a brother, but I hate that term. The job is to make it interesting.

RB: You may hate it, but I’ve lived it, and he’s not wrong. With today’s journalism world there isn’t as much space for that, so we have to make it interesting ourselves. We’ve done that at my current firm through launching several big content and events programs that we run ourselves. We have a big conference called Open Cloud, with a huge research report that comes out of it, plus blog posts and findings that are pitched to journalists. There is a traditional PR component to that, but it’s just part of it; we’re also very focused on driving views to our content through social media.

As more and more companies have to program their own story and can’t rely on journalists as intermediaries, understanding digital marketing might be a more important skill than regular PR.

I do approach journalists myself, but extremely judiciously. Even if someone says to me, “Hey, I want you to go talk to this reporter,’ if I know it’s something they won’t be interested in, I won’t do it. It hurts my credibility to pitch stories that aren’t really stories and it doesn’t serve the company well either, which is the most important thing. If we’re planning a press dinner, however, I will do all of the outreach for that. I feel like the journalists might be insulted, might not see the value, if they were invited by someone else.

QH: Any pointers for young companies trying to figure out this world.

RB: You know the line that every company is now a software company. To some extent, every company is a little bit of a media company too, even if they’re just posting stuff on LinkedIn. The question is, how well are you thinking about the audience and your strategic goals? The first thing we ask, whenever we bring on a new portfolio company and there’s a funding announcement or whatever, the first thing we ask is, “What are the business goals here?” We don’t announce mews for ego or for fun. What is the audience, where and how do we run something that is meaningful for them? Then we think about how to tell the story.

QH: You mentioned “journalism falling apart.” Is it toast?

RB: Journalism is not going to die. It’s undergoing obviously seismic changes, and we’re at a place where we’re experimenting with lots of different models, but there are models that are working. Look at what Jessica Lessin has built with The Information. They break lots of news, have great conferences. It seems like a hybrid of a traditional trade publication for tech, a really big trade, along with something new.

Other people are doing the same kind of thing, with good success. Here’s my question about all these newsletter businesses, though: How do you write really tough, investigative stories, the kinds that as we know can get you sued? When you’re at The Journal, and the government of Singapore goes after you, there’s an army of in-house lawyers protecting you. I worry how the really hard stuff will get supported.