Career Switch Podcast: Expert advice for your career change · Lixandra Urresta

35: Leaving media: Career change for editors

·29 min·5 clips

Alexandra Uresta opens by naming the layoffs hitting journalism and media. She says she wanted to make an episode specifically for editors, and her own layoff from women's magazines in 2018 gives that setup some personal weight. Chandra Turner joins to talk through what happens when editors look beyond media. She describes the steady stream of companies that come to her looking for editorial talent. The list includes real estate, venture capital, luxury bedding, fashion e-commerce, telemedicine, a health nonprofit, and a relationships app. Turner treats those examples as evidence that editorial skills can travel. She explains that each business needs a different kind of subject knowledge. A relationships app needs someone who understands what dating today looks like and what it feels like to use dating apps. A luxury bedding brand needs someone who understands red count, how things are tailored, what the trends are, and the right interior designer connections. Her work starts with people she knows and people her network recommends. She reaches out to former colleagues and other editors who can point her toward the right fit. For the luxury bedding role, she says she found a woman who had previously worked at Martha Stewart and then moved on to other home interiors brands and companies. For a venture capital firm, she points to a woman who was also a founder herself, started a newsletter for teenagers, and had worked at Teen Vogue and The Cut. The conversation also asks what clients are actually looking for when they call her. Turner says many already know they want editorial expertise, even if they do not yet have the right words for it. They may know they want content and good content, but not exactly what form it should take. That is where she has to explain what an editor does in brand publishing or content marketing versus promotion. The episode keeps coming back to practical translation rather than abstract reinvention. It ends with a reminder to reach out to other people and write letters of interest. The overall message is simple. An editor's next role may depend less on a total identity reset than on naming the skills they already have.

As heard by us

A practical look at how editorial judgment can carry into work outside media.

The episode makes a plain case for laid off editors: the move is not a reinvention story so much as a job of carrying editorial judgment into other businesses.

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Why you'd press play

You need a clear path out of media without pretending your skills vanished.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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