Preparing to be ‘a journalist for a day’

Actually, it’s ‘journalist for two days’. Frank from Frankwatching (one of the leading Dutch marketing blogs, with over 20.000 subscribers alone (RSS, newsletter, Twitter)) has asked me to report about the DNA event in Brussels for his blog.

Couldn’t and didn’t want to say no, so I took a two day leave at work. For quite a few years already, I have been attending conferences like DNA from a visitor’s perspective. But now it’s time to go the journalist way. Again, because in a far away past  – not that far but it surely feels like that- I used to be a journalist, not the project manager I am today. Curious whether I’ll be able to undust my reporting skills fast enough. But I’m also convinced it will work out just fine.

I made up my mind

I’m gonna move to Canada, yeah I made up my mind. My favourite (Belgian) singer of the moment, Milow, is singing about big dreams. About making up his mind. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes I didn’t and sometimes I did.

This week I have made up my mind: I’m not moving to Canada, but I decided to work somewhere else.  Big deal?, you might think. Well, being the project manager of HasseltLokaal was my first job, so it was a big deal to make my decision.  Especially since it involved much more than one might think.

Since I was 10, I have been interviewing people in the neighbourhood and selling my self-made newspapers afterwards, convinced to be a journalist one day. I studied languages and journalism, and got to work at the newspaper Het Belang van Limburg, among others on the HasseltLokaal project. So goal achieved. But now I had to realise (and that took me quite some time) that this big dream wouldn’t make me happy anymore. I want to move on in project management.

And thus from next week onwards, I will be the brand new community manager at Citylive, working with test users on the one hand and the Citylive marketing team on the other. I’m really looking forward to this, although I’ll miss my job, the citizen reporters and my colleagues big time. Luckily, they’re never far away thanks to the internet 🙂