I didn’t leave journalism. I left a job to make more room for the work journalism needs next.

“The only way we grow as leaders is by stretching the limits of who we are — doing new things that make us uncomfortable but teach us through direct experience who we want to become.” — Herminia Ibarra

That quote from The Authenticity Paradox has been following me around for months. Perhaps because it captures something I had slowly begun to recognise in my own work: certain professional shifts rarely arrive as dramatic decisions. More often, they emerge gradually — through conversations, patterns, tensions, observations, and the recurring sense that some questions keep asking for more of your attention.

Over the past years, I found myself increasingly working in the spaces between journalism’s traditional boundaries — where leadership, organisational culture, strategy, technology, audience engagement, learning and public value intersect.

In conversations across public broadcasters, print and digital newsrooms, universities, fellowships, conferences, workshops, and countless coffees and walks, the same underlying question kept resurfacing: How do we help journalism evolve without losing the people who make it and the people it is meant to serve along the way?

Because underneath conversations about AI, innovation, platforms, trust or future audiences sits something more fundamental. Newsrooms expected to transform while continuing to produce at full — and often even greater — speed. Leaders simultaneously navigating strategy, restructuring, technology, audiences and day-to-day operations. Teams asked to collaborate across disciplines without always having the structures, language or time to do so. Professionals trying to innovate while running on batteries that have long been flashing red.

The longer I worked around these questions — both within news organisations and as an independent researcher and lecturer — the more convinced I became that resilient journalism requires more than prioritizing innovation strategies, AI roadmaps or new products alone. It also requires cultivating news organisations and pre-competitive ecosystems where people can learn, collaborate, reflect and navigate continuous change together.

Lucy Kueng has written for years that digital transformation in journalism is far messier than strategy documents often suggest. Beneath visible shifts in products and platforms lies a deeper organisational transformation around leadership, culture, talent, routines and behaviour. As she argues, organisations often spend enormous energy transforming products while investing far less in transforming the organisation itself. 

Her work also highlights something many newsroom leaders quietly recognise: transformation rarely fails because strategy does not exist. It falters in the difficult, often invisible work of implementation — in burnout, fragmentation, lack of alignment, and the exhausting process of trying to “knit together” old and new parts of organisations while people are already depleted. 

Michelle Faust Raghavan perhaps summarises the underlying truth most simply: journalists are people.

That sounds almost painfully obvious. Yet in a sector shaped by urgency, acceleration and constant output, we forget — or minimise — it surprisingly often. In her writing on newsroom leadership, Faust Raghavan argues that journalism cannot sustain itself by continuing cycles of burnout, emotional exhaustion and “tough love” management cultures. She calls for leadership that values emotional labour, empathy, rest and humanity as core organisational capacities rather than soft afterthoughts. 

Around six years ago, I began researching newsroom leadership, professional development, organisational culture and digital transformation. Not from a traditional management perspective, but from a growing fascination with a deceptively simple question: how can journalism remain relevant, valuable, financially sustainable and deeply human for the people who make it and the people who rely on it?

Gradually, I began to see leadership everywhere. In the people creating space. In those willing to ask difficult questions. In those helping slow things down when everything accelerates. In those capable of holding uncertainty without immediately shutting it down. In those trying to create alignment, trust and direction while knowing not everything can yet be known.

That aligns closely with what leadership scholars describe as leadership-as-practice: leadership not as heroic individual performance, but as something emerging between people — through conversations, routines, relationships and collective practice.

At the same time, I increasingly struggled with my own hybrid professional identity and eclectic academic background.

I moved constantly between journalism, research, education, facilitation, strategy and organisational development. My work often sat somewhere between academic reflection and industry practice: more practice-oriented than many researchers, more evidence- and theory-informed than many practitioners. I was never fully operating inside the relentless 24/7 production logic, yet I was deeply embedded within the realities of the industry itself — observing patterns, connecting ideas and trying to understand the underlying dynamics shaping change.

I needed space to zoom out, connect dots and create what Megan Reitz and John Higgins describe so beautifully as spaciousness: room for reflection, sense-making and attention in environments dominated by speed and constant output.

For a long time, I experienced that hybridity as a weakness. Too broad. Too interdisciplinary. Not specialised enough.

Over time, that perspective slowly began to shift.

Through research, collaboration and many conversations, I started recognising that journalism’s most complex challenges increasingly require exactly this kind of connective work: people capable of moving between disciplines, translating between professional languages, connecting strategy to practice, technology to culture, and innovation to professional identity.

Jennifer Brandel describes this as interstitial work: work happening in the spaces between systems, organisations and disciplines. Work that often remains invisible or difficult to measure, yet turns out to be essential for enabling change, connection and collective learning. In her more recent work on The Interstitium, she describes these roles as the connective tissue between people, organisations and ideas — the relational infrastructure that allows ecosystems to adapt, learn and evolve. 

Perhaps that is what I have gradually come to understand most clearly over the past years: the very profile I spent years trying to “fix” increasingly felt like the profile I needed to take seriously.

And perhaps this extends far beyond my own experience. I believe journalism urgently needs more people able to connect, translate, facilitate, design, research and collaborate across traditional silos and institutional boundaries.

Much of the work that energised me most happened precisely there: between editorial, technology, research, strategy, policy and audience work. In communities of practice. In projects around trust, AI, public value, leadership, news avoidance and professional development.

Over the past years — often alongside my role at NPO — I have been helping build some of that connective infrastructure in the Netherlands through conversations, workshops, research projects, experiments, communities and collaborations.

At the same time, I realised how many thoughtful, generous and deeply skilled people I had the privilege to meet across journalism, public institutions, academia, independent media, technology, audience engagement and organisational development. Increasingly, I feel the future lies in connecting that expertise more consciously and building new collaborative forms across the wider public information ecosystem.

The scaffolding is already there. The soil has been turned over. What now feels necessary is more room to continue building.

So yes: I have decided to leave my role at NPO.

Not because I am stepping away from journalism, but because I want to step more fully into the work that has gradually been taking shape over the past years: journalism leadership, leadership development, public value, newsroom culture, professional learning, strategy and practice-based research.

From this summer onwards, I will focus more fully on work at the intersection of research, facilitation, consultancy, learning design and collective inquiry — through leadership programmes, workshops, strategic conversations, organisational guidance, communities of practice and collaborative research initiatives across journalism and the broader civic information ecosystem.

And because this work touches so many forms of expertise, I want to do it collaboratively. Over the years I have met incredibly thoughtful and driven people — both in the Netherlands and internationally — across journalism, audience engagement, leadership, technology, strategy, product, research and organisational culture. Working together makes this work richer, sharper and more meaningful — and helps build a broader movement in which journalistic practice, public value, independent creators, research and innovation become more consciously connected.

So if this resonates, I would genuinely love to hear from you.

For coffee. For conversations. For collaboration. For questions around leadership, strategy, culture, AI, professional development, public value or collective learning. Or simply to think together about where journalism — and the wider public information ecosystem — might need to go next.

And if you’re already sitting in my inbox, DMs or Signal and I still owe you a reply after the past busy months: I haven’t forgotten you. I’ll properly resurface over the summer. 💛

More soon.