Bruce Upbin on The Jump From Journalism to Comms

Mixing Board Studio Session

Bruce Upbin has a 30-year track record of crafting stories, building audiences, launching and managing media products, and creating campaigns for innovative and disruptive brands. He spent 20 years at Forbes Media, rising from fact checker and reporter to managing editor in charge of its technology and wealth reporting teams and iconic lists.

Bruce left journalism in 2016 to seek fortune and fame in the tech startup world, where he’s helped build brands in fintech and high-speed transportation. He’s currently Head of Communications for TetraScience. Before that he was the EVP & Head of Content at Archetype, the VP Policy & Communications at Zest AI and the VP Strategic Communications at Hyperloop One.

In this Studio Session, Bruce and Founder Sean Garrett talk about why ex-journalists can get so much done in a week, the importance of patience in building company narratives, why an editorial mindset is a competitive advantage in the brand content game, the value of principled pushback against founders who are out over their skis, and some truths about navigating the journalist-to-communications transition.

SG: What are you up to now? How did you find yourself at Tetra?

BU: I'm heading up communications at TetraScience, the scientific data and AI cloud for a lot of the world’s biggest biopharma companies. I started here about a year ago after running into our CEO as he was looking for someone to fill this role. He and I go way back - I edited a feature on one of his startups during the dot-com era, so we have a lot of common reference points and a base of trust.

What attracted me to TetraScience is that we're tackling the foundational data problem that's preventing AI from truly transforming drug research, development, and manufacturing. While everyone's focused on the flashy AI models, we're building the essential data integration platform that makes those models actually useful in pharma. We're creating specialized data frameworks that let companies like Pfizer and Novartis connect their scientific data to AI and our domain expertise in science has made us the preferred partner to some of the horizontal data and cloud giants like Databricks, Microsoft, Snowflake, and Google.

We're at this perfect growth stage - about 150 people - where I can have real impact but we have enough resources to execute. If we get this right, we'll be the Palantir of scientific data - the essential platform that everyone in the industry relies on because we've solved the hard integration problems that no one else wants to tackle. That's a comms challenge I couldn't pass up.

SG: What's your remit there? How many hats are you wearing?

BU: A lot of hats! I’m building our communications function from scratch, working with the leadership team and reporting directly to the CEO. My role spans strategic and executive communications, some brand positioning, and lots of content development to establish category leadership in the scientific data space—particularly around how AI transformation in pharma depends on solving the upstream data challenges.

We're seeing good traction in industry coverage and systematically building toward broader recognition in technology and business forums like Davos, JP Morgan Health, and Milken.

I've worked in many verticals, from high-speed transportation and fintech to enterprise software and telecoms, but biopharma presents unique communication challenges. It's my first time working in this space, which has motivated me to understand the industry’s distinct dynamics better. I’ve noticed one thing: if you're not on the drug discovery side—using AI to produce new molecules and therapies—it’s a bit harder to get reporters to listen unless you've unlocked something amazing for them.

SG: You're someone who's written the cover story many times and been the cover story before. You mentioned Davos as this archetypal eventual end point that you get to where everything is perfect (wink). You're currently in the phase where you are hustling to get trade coverage. How do you manage that? How do you phase your approach and manage expectations internally?

BU: I’m manifesting patience a lot. Success in comms requires understanding which milestones matter at each stage of company development. Not every company needs to be at Davos immediately and, ironically, when you do get there, it's not always the victory lap it’s cracked up to be.

Our CEO shares this mindset, often reminding me we’re just starting. “Bruce,” he says, “this is not even the first inning, we just got out of the car in the stadium parking lot." So my approach is to develop a comms roadmap that aligns with our near-term business objectives. Consistency, repetition, and credibility are essential. In complex technical markets like ours, you must say the same thing about 17 times before people get it. Patience is invaluable because it keeps us focused on establishing the right narrative foundations rather than chasing premature visibility.

And then, when we do achieve significant milestones, like our string of partnerships and the recent success at the JP Morgan healthcare conference, we leverage those moments to advance our broader narrative. I'm fortunate to work with a CEO who can drop into any situation and wow people, and a co-founder with authentic industry credibility—qualities that will differentiate us as we expand our visibility.

SG: You're not the only journalist to make the into comms. What's your take -- is it natural to jump from journalism into comms? Are journalists even particularly effective comms people? I'm sure you get a lot of current and former journalists who have come to you over the years who have asked, "Should I?" What do you tell them?

BU: It depends what kind of journalist you were. We are not all the same. If you need breaking stories and constant things happening just to feel alive, then you should probably go into mergers or crisis comms.

I was a tech feature writer and editor. I like the grander stories, explaining what's going on with technology, introducing new technologies and the fascinating people creating them and bringing them to market. That training translates well to strategic communications and building categories.

Newsrooms tend to be these chaotic places with very direct, informal, abrupt orders and conversations. Snark and humor don’t work in the corporate world. And the clear hierarchy of a masthead looks nothing like what you get in matrixed corporate organizations. You've got to learn humility and how to work through stakeholders and get used to not always having your way. It's not your story anymore. You're advancing an organizational narrative and a lot more people have their say in the matter.

That said, the fluidity of newsrooms—being able to adapt quickly when priorities change—is an incredibly valuable teacher. We're accustomed to meeting tight deadlines. People in companies are amazed at how much ex-journalists can get done in a week and how fast they write. The core storytelling capabilities remain invaluable, but the transition requires conscious adaptation.

SG: What surprised you most about comms, not just immediately but continuously and as you've gotten deeper into your career in it?

BU: I used to think William Goldman’s line about Hollywood, that “nobody knows anything,” was true about the corporate world, but now I know that doesn’t hold water in tech companies. The depth of expertise across disciplines in technology companies is astonishing. Working in a newsroom for 21 years doesn’t really prepare you for working side-by-side with scientists and engineers. My first role at Virgin Hyperloop One immersed me with fluid dynamicists, structural and chemical engineers, and safety specialists—brilliant minds applying software and physics to transportation challenges in mind-blowing ways.

Figuring out how to talk to these folks and understanding how different personas—from engineers to investors—process information and what questions they prioritize has fundamentally changed my approach to storytelling. Specialized knowledge is what drives innovation, and appreciating that helps me craft more credible, precise narratives.

SG: Is there any competitive advantage of coming from the journalism world and being in comms in 2025?

BU: On the media relations side, absolutely. You know how to stand apart from the company and know what external audiences are going to want, what journalists are going to want. There’s a lot of power in the ability to quickly figure out a tagline or headline, and boil the whole story down to the three things people are going to care about are.

Thank god I did so much video and social and conference work on my way up at Forbes. Now I'm doing a lot of coaching with executives on how to deliver better keynotes and improve their video and online presence. I have way more credibility with them coming from Big Media than if I came into this from marketing or traditional PR. I can explain and show them how it should sound and look and what they should say with more confidence.

Also, the editorial perspective that journalists and editors build up over time remains a superpower that shouldn't be taken for granted. Journalists are trained to think in headlines, quickly identify what’s going to resonate with skeptical audiences, and organize facts and anecdotes and evidence into clear and credible throughlines. They question groupthink and know how to place information within broader contexts rather than look at things in isolation.

SG: You mentioned defending good ideas, how do you do that?

BU: It's about defending your team and their ideas. A good idea does need to be defended because it will get knocked down if it’s new enough. For example I once had a client, a CEO and founder who was very, very obnoxious, almost abusive about all our agency’s ideas. I finally had to stand up for someone who wasn't on a call and said, "You have to stop. This person's doing the best that they can based on what they know works. Believe it or not, they've done this longer than you have."

You get a lot of founders like that. Maybe they're out over their skis and they take their insecurity out on people with liberal arts degrees. People don't always stand up to that because they're worried about confrontation, conflict, getting fired, or getting demoted, whatever it is. But often the truth is that hard-driving founders appreciate that pushback, even if you end up on the losing end of the idea, as long as you’re focusing on strategic outcomes rather than personal preferences.

Indeed, I found out later this particular gentleman said, "Boy, that Bruce, he really sticks up for his principles, I respect that. We may not agree but I respect that," and I take that as a win.

SG: When you made the move it was more about -- oh a former journalist will be good for media relations. But now it's probably more about, a former journalist will be good for our content strategy. How has that evolved for you? How much of what you think about in terms of content versus classic media relations?

BU: My instincts are a lot crisper around the content and PR side than they are around brand strategy, and I’m okay with that because content and media relations are tactics-driven, which is a mode that’s dear to my heart. I’m a fan of tactics-over-strategy at the startup stage. If you try out a bunch of ideas, and find ones that work, that can coalesce into a fairly effective comms strategy. But getting great content and pitches out there are critical force-multipliers for unified brand narratives. You always have to be digging up the IP in your organization and transforming it into compelling assets that advance your market position.

The last thing I want to do is work for months on a brand deck that’s 40 slides and no one looks at it again. I try to be a full-stack comms leader, integrating media, content, executive positioning, and internal communications. I love moving among these disciplines seamlessly—ensuring our external media engagements are supported by substantive content assets, and that our executive communications reflect consistent messaging across all channels. It’s all a blur now anyway, right?

SG: You mentioned collaborating with the CEO and you mentioned the engineers in your first job in comms at Hyperloop. What is your general sense of collaboration across a company? Where do you fit into that? Or how much of that do you instill?

BU: Being a good collaborator is hard! I was so used to just going off and doing thing on my own, but I know that's not how it works. It requires balancing execution with structured alignment and process, words that most journalists are totally allergic to. I wish I could say I’ve developed a systematic approach to cross-functional work that takes care of all the right stakeholders and eliminates unnecessary bottlenecks. I’m getting better at it and would love to hear more on that from the Mixing Board community.

What I've found is that technical teams appreciate clarity on how their input will be incorporated and what objectives we're collectively trying to achieve. For example, when developing somewhat technical content with our scientific team, I establish very clearly upfront why we’re doing it and what we need from them and where comms will apply its own judgment on framing and positioning.

Interestingly, AI tools (I’m a friend of Claude) have enhanced my ability to collaborate by helping me structure projects into discrete workstreams with clear dependencies for other people on the team. This allows me to focus on the more creative, high-value aspects while ensuring stuff gets done the right way.

My approach to credit and recognition has also evolved. My ego died a few years back during the pandemic. Collaboration goes a lot more smoothly when what you care about is that the right work gets done well, not who came up with the idea or who gets credit for it.

SG: Are you actively facilitating internal awareness around what you're up to? Are you doing the internal comms role too where you're getting people aligned and fired up about this stuff?

BU: Internal communications is becoming an increasingly big focus for me at TetraScience. Now that I've established a deeper understanding of our organization, I'm taking a more active role in shaping our internal narrative and cultural alignment. As a remote-only company, it can be tough to maintain the culture. We're going to be having our first all-hands off-site since 2022 and I’ll be working with folks to create communications-focused sessions that help everybody align on our narrative and practice articulating why what we do is so valuable to the world.

I see it as critical to keep the executive leadership up to date on our comms initiatives and landscape, and provide news and context on our #ai-at-tetrascience and #industry-education Slack channels. And I love getting more involved with our Sciborgs, the group of classically trained scientists at TetraScience who live at the intersection of data, science and AI. We just started a cool new LinkedIn Live series called Sciborg Sessions where they get to tell their stories and raise awareness about how critical their work is for advancing biopharma outcomes. Best of all, I get to use it as a way to identify promising communicators across the organization who can amplify our message through their own authentic voices.

SG: You mentioned that you had the worst second day on the job of anybody in comms. Tell us about that.

BU: It was the worst only because the first day was so remarkable. After considerable deliberation about leaving Forbes, I joined Virgin Hyperloop One—a company I'd profiled in a cover story 18 months earlier, which already raised eyebrows among my journalism colleagues.

My first day we had around 100 global journalists out to a major technology demonstration in the desert north of Las Vegas—we propelled a sled chassis to more than 110 mph in under two seconds using a new linear electric motor. Everyone cheered and then we went back and had a highly successful evening featuring executive keynotes, partner panels, and tremendous media coverage generating billions of impressions.

Day Two was the hangover. When we got back to HQ in Los Angeles, we discovered that half the engineering leadership team had walked out, leaving behind a comprehensive list of demands for equity and organizational change. It got public very quickly, and kind of ugly. We went into rapid-response mode, fielding inquiries from the same journalists who'd been celebrating with us the previous night. Lawyers got very involved. People were forced to take sides.

Here I was, brought in to be the chief storyteller – write the keynotes, talk to the lawmakers, lead these presentations all around the world – and then all of a sudden, I was doing crisis comms. I made some early missteps in media interactions that required immediate correction. It took several months to navigate the subsequent litigation and rebuild organizational momentum.

Maybe it was good to go through the fire after 20 years of steady career progression at Forbes, because the past eight years have brought a bunch more unexpected challenges and setbacks. I don’t regret it for a second. I’ve grown a ton professionally and gained that other kind of resilience you need in comms.

SG: Well, you did enter a sector that's changing quite a bit, in industries that are changing quite a bit, in a time of great change with COVID and all that stuff. So don't take it personally.

BU: No, I get it. Disruption and failure and struggle are the defining conditions of being in tech. I spent all those years profiling successful founders getting fantastically wealthy, but it was from a safe distance. When you’re in it, you realize that for every unicorn there are hundreds of flops and most people walk away from startups with nothing to show for it but the friends they made along the way.

But to go back to the topic of journalists transitioning to communications—I've observed a clear pattern. Those who approached journalism with genuine curiosity about their subjects and an embrace of media as a business venture tend to thrive in corporate environments. They recognize that compelling stories exist in every sector and can adapt their craft to new contexts.

I wouldn’t want too many journalists to think they should or could go into comms. We want smart, dogged journalists who hold power to account to stay in the business. I take a more nuanced view than those who broadly criticize "journo-activists." I still have massive respect for what journalists do, and lord knows we need robust accountability journalism now more than ever. I just decided to take my storytelling skills and use them in a different way.

SG: If you had a young journalist coming to you tomorrow and saying, "Hey, Bruce, I really am thinking about getting into this comms thing, just like you've done." What advice would you give them on how they should approach entering into this industry?

BU: I recently saw a heart-breaking post on Threads from a journalist who was cut from Vox. I reached out to her, because I was affected by what she wrote. I told her I was one of those people, further back, who had to lay off a bunch of people myself, talented people who didn't know what to do next. I told her this story about how I made a young woman cry after I told her to get out of journalism if she knew what's good for her. That was 2009 – and it was the wrong thing to say. She kept going in the media business for a few more years before her career took an amazing turn into tech startups, entrepreneurship, an international relocation, and building a family. She did all kinds of things. We can't give up supporting people who want to do it. But there is a good life after journalism because the skills transfer well into all kinds of gigs.

So this journalist from Vox, she said, “Thank you so much for sending, it gave me a little more hope.” And I'm glad to do it. There's work out there. I just joined the board of the local paper in my small town two hours north of New York City. We’re looking to hire a reporter and maybe an editor. There's work in not-for-profit journalism, too, grants for things like climate and public health journalism. Foundations will fund your work. People will subscribe to things that are good.

SG: Do you have specific advice for people coming from journalism into comms?

BU: Look, journalism's tough as hell right now, and still a ton of fun and rewarding at times, but there's life after—sometimes even a better life. Just don't do what I did and jump straight into the deep end of a startup. I changed everything everywhere all at once. I would do something half a step from what you're doing—same beat or same industry or same city. Find a place with a real comms team where you can learn while using what you already know. And pick a company people want to write about. Relevancy is a gift, I remember Caryn Marooney telling me once. Trust me, that part makes a lot of difference.

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