In today’s digital landscape, investing in high-quality journalism isn’t just a luxury for brands with big budgets—it’s more often an essential strategy for competitive brands looking to build authority, credibility, and trust with audiences. For many brands, creating and distributing compelling, data-driven content with the journalistic rigor audiences are coming to expect remains out of reach due to limited resources, high costs, or lack of expertise.
That’s why our team at Stacker created a new marketplace designed to lower the barrier to high-quality journalism for brands. Marketplace connects you with expertly crafted stories that elevate your brand’s reputation and ensure your stories reach a wide audience through our distribution network.
Now, with just a few clicks, your brand can be featured as the source of a premium piece of data journalism distributed to the most reputable news publishers nationwide.
With Marketplace, brands can browse a curated list of available stories. These stories can be timely or more evergreen and cover a wide range of beats—such as health, education, and business. Their stages of readiness vary, from pitches to stories currently in production, giving brands the option to move at their own pace.
Claiming stories
If you spot a story that aligns with your brand’s content focus, you can claim it in Marketplace, securing it for distribution with your brand featured as the source of the content.
The stories our newsroom produces often peg to timely cultural events that help brands maximize attention and awareness through their earned media coverage. To be featured in some timely stories, choose the story in Marketplace ahead of the claim date and news peg. For evergreen pitches, our newsroom team will produce a story once a brand claims it in Marketplace.
So, say there's a significant cultural event coming up that your brand could capitalize on if you could get a timely story out, but because of resource restrictions, you won't have a piece of content prepared in time. There's a chance you'll find a relevant story in Marketplace available for you to claim and have distributed just in time for the event.
Once finalized, the story is distributed across our network of publishing partners, featuring your brand and linking to its website.
Find a video overview of the new Marketplace here.
The idea for Marketplace was born from a simple insight: Brands want to invest in high-quality journalism but often face barriers like cost, expertise, and bandwidth. To address this, we designed a new home in our client portal for unclaimed stories and pitches that serves as a turnkey solution for brands to leverage the strengths of our experienced newsroom and publishing network at a moment’s notice.
After months of testing, iteration, and feedback implementation, we launched Marketplace to continue to bridge the gap between brands and first-rate storytelling.
Our development process focused on three key pillars:
We wanted to make sure our brand partners had easy and timely access to the stories available on Marketplace, which required connecting the content management system used by our newsroom with our customer portal, giving users more visibility on the stories already in progress.
The selection of stories featured in Marketplace is curated based on feedback from our publishing partners detailing the types of stories they're currently looking for and insights from our newsroom team, including journalism veterans and skilled data reporters and editors. This selection process ensures that brands only get access to stories with a high potential for pickup on the newswire.
Once brands had access to the stories, we needed to give them a way to find the ones that would align with their content strategy. We added filters to the portal that make it easy for brands to see the stories available based on their real-time production stage and timeliness. For stories pegged to specific events, we added deadlines by which brands needed to claim a story to confirm the claiming process would not impact the calendar strategy for the story. With this filtering system, brands can decide which story to claim based on the topic and how quickly they want to proceed.
Once you spot a story you’re interested in, you can use Marketplace interface to simply click a headline, view more information about the story, such as timeliness and story methodology, and claim it with a couple of clicks. After you claim a story, we’ll attach your brand and make it available to our distribution network when it’s at peak newsworthiness.
We plan to continue refining Marketplace and its collection of stories based on feedback from publishing and brand partners. Soon, we’ll also incorporate machine learning to provide brands with predictions on a story's potential results and recommendations of stories that would best match their strategy and content calendar.
Whether you’re a startup looking for new growth opportunities or an established organization aiming to strengthen your authority and thought leadership, Stacker’s Marketplace brings the ability to attach your brand to compelling, high-quality journalism to your fingertips.
Sam Kaye is Product Manager at Stacker and one of the creators of Marketplace. Sam holds a BA in Journalism from the San Diego State University, and previously worked in both media and PR. He's also a volunteer writer for TogetherWell, a publication dedicated to lowering the systematic barriers to mental health education and tools.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva