From the Newsroom to the Boardroom: Why I Turned My Love of Storytelling Into a Career That Helps People Make Good Decisions
How a journalist discovered that storytelling's greatest impact might not be in the newsroom.
I Didn’t Leave Storytelling. I Found a Better Way to Use It.
I became a journalist because I wanted to help people.
That probably sounds strange to say about an industry known for chasing bad news, but that's genuinely how it started for me. I have a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of Oklahoma, and since I was 12 years old, I chased that dream with everything I had.
Reporting, to me, meant giving people information they needed, holding the powerful accountable, and telling stories that mattered.
I got to do exactly that as a news reporter after graduation, and for a while, it felt like I'd landed exactly where I was supposed to be.
But anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows something the outside world doesn't always see: the industry runs on conflict.
Bad news travels faster and sells better than good news. The stories that got the most attention were rarely the ones that left people feeling hopeful, informed, or empowered.
Over time, I realized I wasn't helping people in the way I'd set out to. I was documenting problems, often without the opportunity to be part of any solution.
That disconnect wore on me in a way I didn't expect.
So I made a choice that surprised some people who knew me back then:
I left reporting.
Not because I stopped loving storytelling, but because I wanted to use it differently.
Storytelling With a Different Purpose
Marketing and branding aren't the direction most journalism majors picture when they walk across the graduation stage.
But once I stepped into the field, I realized how much the two disciplines actually have in common.
Good marketing, like good journalism, is about clarity, honesty, and understanding an audience well enough to know what they actually need to hear.
The difference is what you're building toward.
Instead of reporting on a problem after the fact, I got to help businesses solve problems, communicate clearly, and make decisions with confidence—before the story turned into a crisis.
Since making that shift, I've built my career across a surprising range of industries: nonprofit, higher education, financial management, banking, and now energy.
On paper, those fields have little in common.
But every one of them taught me the same lesson:
No matter how different the audience or the product, people trust organizations that communicate clearly and tell them the truth.
Whether I was helping a nonprofit articulate its mission, helping a university connect with prospective students, or helping a bank explain a financial product in plain language, the job was always the same:
Take something complicated, find the human story inside it, and make it make sense.
That range is part of why I don't see myself as a marketer who happens to work in energy.
I see myself as a storyteller who has learned to move fluidly between industries, because clarity is clarity, no matter what you're selling.
That range is also what brought me to Pilot Energy, where I am the Marketing Lead for a national commercial and industrial energy advisory firm.
It's not an industry I ever expected to land in, but it turns out to be one where storytelling and clarity matter more than people realize.
Energy is one of those categories almost every business depends on, yet almost no one outside the industry fully understands.
Contracts are dense. Markets are volatile. Pricing structures can be genuinely confusing, even to sophisticated business leaders.
I've sat in on enough conversations with our advisory team to see how often companies make costly energy decisions simply because no one has broken the information down in a way they can actually use.
That's where I come in.
My job isn't to negotiate contracts or model energy markets. Our advisors are the experts in that.
My job is to make sure that expertise doesn't stay locked inside spreadsheets and industry jargon.
I build the content, campaigns, and conversations that translate complexity into something a business owner or facilities director can actually understand—and act on.
Why This Feels Like the Job I Was Always Meant to Have
There's a version of me that still misses the newsroom.
I miss the deadline energy, the thrill of a good interview, and the satisfaction of a well-told story landing exactly right.
But I don't miss the feeling of reporting on problems I had no hand in solving.
What I do now still uses every skill I built as a journalist:
Asking good questions.
Listening for what matters.
Writing clearly under pressure.
Finding the human thread inside something technical.
The difference is that now, instead of simply informing someone about a negative outcome, the story I tell can help someone make a better decision, gain clarity, and potentially save their business money.
Something we could all use a little more help with in our daily lives.
I think a lot about what it means to be influential, especially as a woman who didn't take the most obvious path into her current industry.
I'm not an engineer.
I'm not a trader.
I don't have letters after my name in energy economics.
But influence doesn't always come from technical mastery.
Sometimes it comes from being the person who makes technical mastery accessible to the people who need it most.
That's the role I've built for myself, and I think it's a form of leadership that doesn't get talked about enough:
The translator.
The clarifier.
The person who takes something dense and makes it usable.
What I'd Tell My Younger Self
If I could go back and talk to the reporter version of me—fresh out of college and chasing her first byline—I'd tell her this:
The goal was never really journalism.
The goal was always to help people understand something true and make a better decision because of it.
Journalism was simply the first place I learned how to do that.
It turns out that skill travels.
It shows up in a blog post explaining energy contract terms in plain English.
It shows up in podcast episodes I host, where industry experts and energy advisors answer questions they've received from listeners nationwide.
It shows up every time I help a business see its own value clearly enough to tell its own story with confidence.
I didn't abandon storytelling when I left the newsroom.
I just found an industry where the story could actually help someone, instead of simply informing them that help was needed.
That's the career I'd encourage any storyteller to look for.
Not necessarily in energy, but in whatever field lets you use your voice to move people toward something better instead of simply reporting on what went wrong.
Jennifer Ford, Marketing Lead—Content, Brand, Communications, is part of the marketing and content team at Pilot Energy, a commercial and industrial energy advisory firm. She holds a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications and began her career as a news reporter before transitioning into marketing, where she helps businesses navigate complex energy decisions through clear, honest storytelling.
