\u201cThe reason I started posting on LinkedIn two years ago was because no one had heard of us,\u201d Greenberg, the CEO of content syndication company Stacker, told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAnd I found that one cheap trick was posting a list of jobs for those types of people once a week.\u201d He rejected the notion that he\u2019s a one-man employment agency for people looking to leave journalism, but he admitted, \u201cit kind of caught fire.\u201d<\/p>\n But the trick is in service of a thesis that\u2019s backed by a business that\u2019s grown from a $3 million run rate to north of $10 million in under two years, all without raising a dollar of venture capital.<\/p>\n Greenberg was quick to clarify he\u2019s not celebrating the death of journalism. What he\u2019s cataloguing is a structural shift in who funds it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tech editor at the Wall Street Journal<\/em> is now the managing editor at NVIDIA,\u201d he said, referring to Shara Tibken. \u201cRobinhood has purchased multiple newsletters. They bought Chartr. They bought MarketSnacks. They hired [former Verge, Vox and Bloomberg editor] Josh Topolsky to be editor-in-chief. I could laundry list a hundred of them.\u201d<\/p>\n When those job listings go viral (which they reliably do), Greenberg said three types of people slide into his DMs. There are journalists curious about making the leap, journalists who already made it and want to evangelize, and journalists who are furious at him for making some kind of equivalence between these jobs and journalism. \u201cTo me,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s less important what it\u2019s called, and more important that the work exists.\u201d He reads all of them, engages selectively, and keeps posting. <\/p>\n \u201cI pull myself back,\u201d he said of the comment-section fights that occasionally ignite. \u201cA good friend of mine who got into a very public spat said, \u2018Roll in mud like pig, get dirty like pig.’\u201d<\/p>\n Before the LinkedIn persona, there was the company\u2014and before the company, there was the observation that launched it. Greenberg co-founded Stacker in 2017. The founding insight came from watching news outlets quietly start publishing content from brands like Zillow and NerdWallet\u2014not because anyone was paying them to, but because the content was genuinely good.<\/p>\n \u201cNerdWallet had hired Maggie Leung from CNN,\u201d he said. \u201cZillow had hired a chief economist. And through talking with a lot of news outlets, we realized, \u2018Hey, there\u2019s some of this stuff that we\u2019d love to publish, we just don\u2019t want to sift through 100 pitches to figure out what\u2019s legit.’\u201d<\/p>\n Stacker became the connector. Brands pay Stacker to help produce and distribute data-driven features; Stacker runs every piece through an in-house editorial team before it touches the newswire; and several thousand news outlets \u2014 90% of them local \u2014 pull from the feed at no cost and with no obligation. Partners include McClatchy, Lee Enterprises, Gray TV and the Local Media Consortium. Total revenue for what Greenberg calls the Stacker Connect content distribution product exceeded $5 million last year and is on pace for $10 million in 2026, according to records reviewed by Fortune<\/em>. (It also makes revenue from a services\/studio business and selling advertising on its site.) The company has never raised outside funding. <\/p>\n Stacker\u2019s in-house editorial standards are stricter than some might expect. Instacart, for example, can\u2019t describe itself as \u201cthe number one food delivery service in the country.\u201d Experian can\u2019t slip in a line recommending its credit-boosting product. A recent piece from a shipping logistics company on the impact of tariffs went out untouched\u2014because the underlying data was real and the story was newsworthy. \u201cAt our best, we are hanging distribution as a carrot to incentivize [brands] to improve the quality of their content,\u201d Greenberg said, \u201cthat\u2019s the opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n Tracy Middleton spent 20 years in magazines\u2014Men\u2019s Health<\/em>, Women\u2019s Health<\/em>, editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal<\/em>\u2014before joining Hone Health, a telehealth clinic and longevity platform that helps men and women take charge of their hormone health, nearly five years ago to build its editorial operation from scratch. She calls herself a \u201cbrand journalist,\u201d a term she didn\u2019t coin but has adopted. Her team includes an executive editor from Reader\u2019s Digest<\/em>, Prevention<\/em> and U.S. News & World Report<\/em> and an SEO\/GEO specialist who went to journalism school\u2014a \u201cunicorn,\u201d Middleton said, because she understands both optimization and storytelling.<\/p>\n The story Middleton said she\u2019s most proud of started with patient data, not an editorial meeting. Shortly after joining Hone, she noticed that a disproportionate share of the company\u2019s members were military veterans. She started asking why, and the answer turned out to be a medical story: traumatic brain injury, chronic stress, and sleep deprivation during service all contribute to hormone imbalances\u2014conditions the Veterans Affairs Department, according to veterans she interviewed, wasn\u2019t adequately addressing. She called the VA for comment, interviewed former servicemembers, engaged an independent fact-checker, and published a deep dive that read like a feature from any of the titles she\u2019d worked at before.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s the type of story that a traditional outlet would tell,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I just don\u2019t know that they would have been able to without the insight that we had of seeing all of these guys on the backend coming in who were veterans.\u201d It won an award from the\u00a0Association of Health Care Journalists, which she pointed to as evidence that brand journalism can be impactful. <\/p>\n It\u2019s precisely the kind of example Greenberg uses to make his case: original, data-driven stories funded by an organization with proprietary insight that no traditional newsroom had access to. Whether it could have been published without Hone\u2019s institutional interest in the subject is a question Middleton doesn\u2019t sidestep. \u201cI think it\u2019s such an interesting time. And it\u2019s so funny because people are like, \u2018Well, AI [is here] and content is changing.\u2019 I was like, \u2018Well, content has always been changing.’\u201d Brand-journalism content, to her, \u201chas interesting things to say and a point of view and a perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Anneken Tappe knows what she left behind. A former economics reporter at CNN and Marketwatch, she now has one of those storytelling jobs that Greenberg posts about\u2014at Chime, the fintech company. She is clear-eyed about the trade-off. \u201cBeing on a breaking news desk when something big is happening on your beat is one of the most exhilarating moments in any journalist\u2019s career,\u201d she told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n But she said her new role channels the same skills. \u201cThe instincts on how to find and frame a story don\u2019t go away. I just found a new home for them,\u201d she said. \u201cCorporate storytelling, brand journalism, owned content is incredibly interesting from a strategic point of view because you\u2019re sitting very much at the pulse of your company. You\u2019re applying the same editorial muscle, but now the stakes are the business itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Together, Middleton and Tappe represent the human face of the trend Greenberg has been cataloguing from LinkedIn. One spent 25 years in lifestyle magazines before finding freedom in a startup\u2019s patient data. The other covered corporate finance for some of the most competitive desks in digital news before trading the rush for a seat inside the machine.<\/p>\n Middleton said she found Stacker through word of mouth and uses the wire primarily for distribution, finding that platforms such as Apple News and MSN were less willing to carry content arriving directly from a brand. \u201cStacker was kind of the way around that,\u201d Middleton said, \u201cto still be able to get onto those platforms indirectly.\u201d<\/p>\n Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, has a precise answer to the broader question: no \u2014 but not in the way the loudest critics of brand content usually mean.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think this can be called journalism, but simply the production of information,\u201d Simon told Fortune<\/em>. Journalism, he explained, can be understood across three dimensions\u2014as a process, a profession, and a field\u2014each of which involves active commitment to a set of values and standards. \u201cA data-driven feature that provides accurate information is not \u2018journalism\u2019 from a normative point of view,\u201d he said, \u201cand likely would not be seen as such by most people.\u201d<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean brand-funded content can\u2019t meet journalistic standards. Simon allows that it can\u2014if the funding is clearly labeled, the author identified, and the provenance of the information transparent. But a core expectation of journalism, he argues, is independence: \u201cnot being subject to other influences that could \u2018corrupt\u2019 journalism\u2019s ability to say things as they are and speak the truth, including to power.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenberg disputed that this distinction is as clean as Simon suggests. \u201cI don\u2019t think that charging for your content as a more traditional journalism business prohibits you from having a bias,\u201d he said. He claimed that one friend who left a major publication to become brand journalists doubled their salary and later reflected that the institutional bias at the old outlet was just as real, but less visible. Other times, when journalists go to \u201cthe dark side,\u201d he\u2019s heard that \u201csometimes it\u2019s a really shitty experience, because it turns out that you are a marketer.\u201d For many brand journalists these days, that is just not true, he said.<\/p>\n To understand where the information ecosystem is heading, it helps to talk to someone who has lived on both sides of it. Meredith Klein spent 20 years in PR\u2014Golin, Jet.com, Walmart, four years as U.S. head of consumer communications at Pinterest\u2014before launching Meredith & The Media<\/em>, a Substack covering the indie media boom, in May 2025. She is, as she describes herself, \u201ca bottle of seltzer\u201d\u2014from New Jersey, excitable, occasionally profane and constitutionally incapable of being boring about an industry she has watched transform from the inside out.<\/p>\n From the PR side of the table, Klein had a front-row seat to the give and take behind the church-and-state ideal that journalists claim they treat as foundational. What\u2019s changed, in her view, isn\u2019t the presence of outside interests in the information ecosystem. It\u2019s the transparency of the transaction. The old model obscured the relationship between advertiser and editorial. The new model \u2014 Stacker, brand journalism, creator newsletters\u2014makes it more legible, even if imperfectly.<\/p>\n She launched her Substack partly to document this transition and partly because she saw an opportunity in it. The indie media boom struck her as the moment the legitimacy hierarchy definitively broke open. \u201cI swear to God, when Joanna Stern left The Wall Street Journal<\/em> and announced New Things<\/em>,\u201d she said, \u201cI almost fell off my chair. I was like, \u2018Okay, this is officially it\u2014independent media is having a moment here.’\u201d Of course, she posted about it.<\/p>\n Now, she spends part of her time advising major companies on how to pitch Substack reporters the same way they\u2019d pitch the Times<\/em> \u2014 with the same embargo discipline, the same exclusive consideration, the same respect for the journalist\u2019s audience. \u201cEveryone\u2019s a publisher,\u201d she said, and outlets like the Journal<\/em> and Fortune<\/em> are competing against Substackers who are not (all) bound by the same conventions before getting their hot takes off. We are swimming in content, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe speed of creator journalism is killing,\u201d Klein said, relating a complaint from a reporter friend of hers. \u201cShe\u2019s got to fact check it three times before she publishes \u2026 but she\u2019s gonna be behind me or someone who might be like, \u2018Oh my God, I heard XYZ was happening.’\u201d In this landscape, \u201ceveryone\u2019s got a platform\u201d and some people are building massive communities, she said. Her belief is that all the different types of content \u201cneed to coexist.\u201d<\/p>\n Klein\u2019s description of Stacker\u2019s value to brand clients is, in this context, both a validation of the model and its most pointed accidental critique. \u201cIt\u2019ll look like real coverage,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna be everywhere. You\u2019re gonna show up in LLMs.\u201d She said critics could frame it as \u201cpay for play\u201d\u2014a new form of paid media that emerged because the old arbitrage economics of digital advertising stopped working and brands needed another way through.<\/p>\n Middleton argued that the world of magazines, from her perspective, was not many miles removed. \u201cHasn\u2019t that always been the case?\u201d A scan of who owns most of the legacy media outlets, including Fortune<\/em>, shows various commercial interests on the masthead. \u201cWe always had this very noble church-and-state divide in journalism that everyone always talked about,\u201d Middleton said, \u201cand I think that shifted over the years, and if it\u2019s not dead already, those lines are certainly blurred more than it used to be,\u201d but it has never been a black-and-white divide, in her experience.<\/p>\n Simon\u2019s response is not that traditional journalism was ever bias-free. It\u2019s that structural independence\u2014however imperfect\u2014is the mechanism that makes accountability journalism possible at all. \u201cCommercial success in the last century helped enable the development of news media with a degree of autonomy and independence,\u201d he said, \u201cwhich allowed them to hold public power to account and provide independent coverage of events, including writing stories and providing coverage that looks at things others might not want looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n The funny thing, Klein disclosed, is that she has caught the journalism bug. \u201cThis is probably the most fun I\u2019ve had in my entire career. Like I am loving it,\u201d she said, before adding the eternal reporter\u2019s complaint: \u201cI mean, I\u2019d like to make a little bit more money.\u201d<\/p>\n The disclosure question cuts to the heart of the model. Stacker says it always discloses to readers that a piece was produced or funded by a brand, but that standard may not always be present throughout the industry. Simon calls that \u201cproblematic\u201d without qualification. \u201cTransparency about the production and the sourcing is inherent in the ethics of journalism and also expected by many audiences,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the same reason why news organizations disclose when something came from a news agency or when something is branded content\u2014and also why these organizations get punished if they fail to do so.\u201d Simon concluded that brand-funded content \u201cerodes trust when it blurs roles,\u201d especially when it \u201clooks, feels, travels, and is promoted like ordinary journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the question: who reports the bad news? If brands are a major part of the storytelling environment, then how much of the increasing amount of content in the ecosystem will be an implicit brand narrative? \u201cI don\u2019t have a good answer for the bad news,\u201d Klein said when asked about the stories that brand-funded outlets are built never to tell. \u201cThat is definitely just how the back-end LLM swirl is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, Middleton has a point that some worthy stories are being told because of the growing brand-journalism space, that wouldn\u2019t exist otherwise. <\/p>\n Simon described the current moment with a phrase that cuts closer to the truth than either the boosters or the skeptics usually manage: \u201can exciting but slightly worrying time.\u201d Exciting, he said, because \u201cit creates new opportunities and new possibilities,\u201d referencing all the worthwhile proprietary data, unique audience insights and stories that a deep-pocketed brand backer can support the telling of. What\u2019s worrying to him is that abundance can masquerade as sufficiency. \u201cIt could lead you to a situation where people think, \u2018we already have what we need\u2019\u2014and I wouldn\u2019t say that\u2019s true. We will need critical reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n What the new ecosystem excels at is the\u00a0\u201cwhy it matters\u201d story. The what-you-need-to-know. The journalism that provides key data and an explanation of why it\u2019s significant fills a genuine gap. At best, it\u2019s a kind of thoughtful and nuanced explanatory journalism that enriches a certain audience with a certain need. It\u2019s what Middleton describes as her editorial north star and Greenberg talks about as the new Red Bull playbook. What it cannot do, almost by design, is investigate the entity funding it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou will need some infrastructure for that,\u201d Simon said. The critical reporting function \u2014 the kind that looks at things powerful people would rather leave un-investigated\u2014requires an organizational structure built explicitly to pursue it, without a financial relationship that constrains what it can say. That kind of work doesn\u2019t have to come from legacy outlets, Simon noted, pointing to investigative nonprofits like Bellingcat and ProPublica as proof that the function can survive outside traditional business models. But it has to come from somewhere. And what Stacker and its clients are building, by their own candid admission, is explicitly not that.<\/p>\n We are, by almost every measure, entering an era of more journalism\u2014or at least more content that looks like journalism, reads like journalism and travels through the same pipes as journalism. There are more voices, more data, more proprietary insights turned into shareable features than at any previous point in the history of the press. The economic model that funds it\u2014brands spending on content as a long-game alternative to Google ad arbitrage, companies like HubSpot and Robinhood building editorial operations to cultivate readers who might one day become customers \u2014 is coherent and, for now, growing.<\/p>\n Greenberg was careful not to overstate what he\u2019s built. \u201cFor the news outlets, we are a really nice-to-have. We\u2019re not a need-to-have.\u201d It is an honest assessment of the wiring beneath the surface\u2014genuinely useful, hard to replicate, and inherently incapable of the work that requires biting the hand that feeds.<\/p>\n \u201cContent has always been changing,\u201d Middleton said. \u201cThe amount of pivots that I\u2019ve seen over the years of doing this, like this is just the next one.\u201d The history of journalism bears her out: the cocaine budgets and interest-free loans from the glory days of magazines were underwritten by advertisers with their own interests; the church-and-state divide was always more aspirational than absolute; and the question of who funds the story has never had a clean answer.<\/p>\n What\u2019s new is the scale, the sophistication and the infrastructure routing it through newsrooms that may not tell you where it came from. You\u2019ll read more. You\u2019ll understand more context. You\u2019ll get more proprietary data turned into readable features than any previous generation of news consumer. And it will be funded by more parties than perhaps ever before.<\/p>\n [This report has been updated to clarify that Stacker always discloses the brand backing for content that it distributes and to correct that Anneken Tappe was at Marketwatch, not Axios.]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #CEO #viral #thirsttrapping #journalists #200k #jobs #content #hes #prove #point<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every few weeks, a job listing circulates through LinkedIn that stops journalists mid-scroll. A fintech company hunting for an editor-in-chief. A tech giant poaching a senior Wall Street Journal editor… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9130,369,5062,892,430,9129,6675,1082,160,5972,5212,9128,774],"class_list":["post-6713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-200k","tag-ceo","tag-content","tag-hes","tag-jobs","tag-journalists","tag-marketing","tag-media","tag-point","tag-prove","tag-start-ups","tag-thirsttrapping","tag-viral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The LinkedIn bait is the argument<\/h2>\n
The bootstrapped wiring underneath<\/h2>\n
The brand journalist on the other side<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1554046069427.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nIs it journalism?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1764272079281.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe PR veteran-turned-brand journalist\u00a0and media reporter<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1758546072334.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe trust problem<\/h2>\n
Exciting, and slightly worrying<\/h2>\n
The new information diet<\/h2>\n