Switching from journalism to project management – interview with Euronews’ Thomas Seymat

Editor’s note: The Fix is running the “What’s your media job” series where we look at different job positions and career trajectories in and around the news industry. For this edition, we spoke with Thomas Seymat, who is Editorial Projects and Development Manager at Euronews and also works as a journalism teacher. 

The news media industry has struggled from the lack of good project management; journalists and editors often have to fulfil this function in addition to their core duties. Thomas Seymat, by contrast, is an example of a journalist who switched to an editorial project management role while continuing to work for a news publisher.

For close to three years now, Seymat has worked as Editorial Projects and Development Manager at Euronews, a major European news network. In an interview with The Fix he recounted how he made the switch from content production to his current role, how he learned to improve as an editorial project manager, and what others can learn from his experience. We also spoke about how Seymat combines his main job with teaching journalism to students. 

What Editorial Projects and Development Manager at Euronews does

Thomas Seymat has been at Euronews for almost 12 years. After a decade-long journalistic career, he joined the business development team in March 2021. He describes his current position as a “bridge role” between business development and the newsroom. 

After joining the team, he became “the editorial person in a team with a lot of business-minded people… I would bring my knowledge and experience on strategic projects: helping develop and train colleagues from the affiliate networks that we have in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Albania, and Georgia; building partnerships with higher education institutions in France and abroad etc.”

In the past year, his role evolved as Euronews is going through a transformation. “I’ve been tasked to be an editorial project manager on the transformation in the newsroom and then the transformation of the entire company. My mission today is being the project manager for editorial questions on the ongoing digital transformation and redeployment of Euronews [as] the company is evolving, redeploying some of its resources to Brussels and launching new bureaus in European capitals”.

Seymat is one of several project managers supporting the reforms at Euronews. The job involves “a lot of meetings, a lot of emails, a lot of aligning people, a lot of making sure that everybody has the same information”, he says. He reports to the Director of Business Development and Distribution and works closely with the Head of Transformation, who is one of Euronews’ editors-in-chief.

Work processes are noticeably different from the times Seymat worked as a journalist. “Contrary to a newsroom role, I don’t really have a day-to-day [work routine]. It’s more like week-to-week rituals and meetings”, Seymat tells The Fix.

Seymat combines his main job with teaching journalism. He has been an educator at various journalism schools at the graduate level for the past seven years, primarily focusing on the topics he has worked on himself, such as media business models. Most recently he has been focusing on teaching generative AI. Seymat says this work is useful for his main job at Euronews; “it forces me to stay up to date” with the latest trends and approaches in journalism.

How to become a good editorial project manager – Seymat’s experience and advice for others

Thomas Seymat says his switch from journalism to project management happened gradually over many years. “I [was getting] more and more missions to develop or implement new tools”, such as live blogging for events and breaking news coverage. “I was doing a bit of product management without the name of it. I would train my colleagues”.

When a proposal he championed received external funding to develop 360° videos, Seymat became a de-facto project manager – “without really any dedicated training or really knowing what it was”. He became better at this job with experience, although he has never been formally certified as a project manager. 

Seymat believes that every journalist has some skills that are useful in project management: splitting a bigger task into smaller ones, getting from an idea to an objective to a deliverable, “is something that journalists do every day”.

One of the hardest challenges in project management is influencing without authority. None of the journalists and newsroom managers Seymat works with report directly to him, yet he has to get them to do things on top of their already demanding day jobs. There is no magic trick, but it takes ingenuity, persistence, and regular communication; all these skills are the ones journalists develop in the course of their reporting. 

For those looking to transition from reporting to project management, a practical piece of advice is to find the money for a project, such as by applying for a grant. This will automatically make you the most obvious option for managing the work you helped fund. (As to specific resources on project management, the best guide Seymat recommends is the handbook by The Wall Street Journal’s Robin Kwong).

More broadly, the shift requires “changing the mindset”, Seymat says. As project manager you don’t have the luxury of publishing something quickly and moving on, you need to adopt a longer-term perspective. “You have to follow through, maybe look at how it went, analyse what went well, what didn’t go so well, and change how you do”. 

Source of the cover photo: International Journalism Festival, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0)

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