A newswire for editorial content from brands?! Meet the CEO of Stacker

That led to the founding of Stacker, a platform that provides free content for news organizations by charging partner brands to syndicate the stories their in-house teams produce. Stacker also boasts a 15-person newsroom of its own that produces original stories, some underwritten by brands, to ensure that the newswire offers a robust rotation of content.

As soon as I heard about Stacker, the model made total sense to me. So many great journalists are working for brands, producing editorial content with high standards and excellent storytelling. (I was working on Subaru Drive at the time, doing exactly that with my team.)

I talked to Noah about his vision for the future of brand journalism and how his team markets a new distribution model for high-quality, vetted brand content.

[The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

Tell me the origin story of Stacker.

My three co-founders and I founded Stacker with this idea of, at first, producing content and making that freely available to third-party outlets. There's been a number of iterations of Stacker over the past seven years, but I think the common thread has really been, can we provide content for free to local news outlets and find other ways to monetize that distribution?

That has come in the form of syndicating to large aggregators that pay a revenue share, like an MSN or an AOL. And it has come in the form of letting brands underwrite content that our newsroom produces. And most recently, over the past two years, in the form of sourcing great content from organizations looking for more distribution and making that the business model, instead of charging news outlets that are seeing shrinking budgets for newswires.

I love the business model of offering this content to newsrooms that are strapped for stories. And you started out offering content underwriting opportunities to brands. Is that still part of what you do?

We do a mix, yeah. When we started out, we had massive distribution, thousands of news outlets tapping into the Stacker newswire every morning. We pretty quickly realized that there were a lot of stories that our newsroom wanted to tell that organizations would sponsor so that they could have the original version on their site as content marketing.

We found that if we wanted to produce a story about changes in the healthcare system, there might be telehealth companies interested in underwriting that, having really interesting original journalism on their site and also having distribution for that content. That allowed us to guarantee to local news outlets across the country that this content is free today and will always be free.

We saw that a lot of organizations were either hiring talented journalists to build out newsrooms in-house or working with content agencies to produce interesting data journalism. It was clear there was a big market in helping those organizations find more distribution in the form of earned reach for their content.

We saw that a lot of organizations were either hiring talented journalists to build out newsrooms in-house or working with content agencies to produce interesting data journalism.

All of the tools that were available – press releases, placement services like Taboola and Outbrain, or more formal sponsored content – don’t do justice to the content when you're hiring journalists to produce original research. It’s not self-promotional sponsorships, but more interesting research that you want to put out into the world to increase your brand authority.

And I think that's really where we saw a gap: can we help boost that distribution, because of that synergy with news outlets seeking more interesting, engaging, authoritative content.

I'm curious about your editorial planning for the content that your team produces; like right now you've got this great story on how Olympic athletes account for climate change in their training.

When we think about original programming from our newsroom, we're asking, what are the stories that will make this newswire interesting and a must-have for any news outlet across the country? In a really simple sense, we make sure that if no one is contributing real estate coverage into the newswire that month, the news outlets downstream are still getting real estate coverage.

Our newsroom, a 15-person team of journalists, is thinking about the stories that are going to make sure that this newswire is a full-feature product for news outlets.

When I was a local newspaper editor, we relied on pulling stories from the AP and shaping them to make them local, because we didn’t have the staff to source original reporting for every section every week. I really relate to that struggle.

It’s interesting, we get a lot of concerns, even from our own newsroom, that we’re enabling the downsizing of these newsrooms. Is a reporter in-house competing with all this free content we're providing? What we're actually seeing is that it's enabling those newsrooms to have their staff focus on more reporting.

I was talking with an executive editor of a news outlet in Ohio a few weeks ago, and they mentioned that their reporters have quotas of three, four, five stories a day to keep their website fresh. And when they can get a story on the housing markets from Rocket Loans and a story on personal finance from Experian, that they know is vetted, quality content, that actually allows them to tell their business reporter to go down to City Hall and do original reporting, versus sitting at their desk to get five stories out today.

The stories they take from Stacker Newswire are rarely going to be the marquee A1 pieces on their homepage. It’s more about them knowing they have more content they can bring into their flow, allowing them to do a little bit more original reporting and support whatever business model they have.

Is a reporter in-house competing with all this free content we're providing? What we're actually seeing is that it's enabling those newsrooms to have their staff focus on more reporting.

How do you maintain a high level of quality for the content on Stacker?

Not just any organization can contribute content to Stacker’s newswire. Every story that you see on our newswire from a third party is first approved at the brand level by Stacker’s brand jury, which looks at their business model and who is actually writing this content? Is it high school interns writing about complex marketing and finance topics, or is it journalists and seasoned editors, et cetera. Once approved, every story is vetted by our editors to make sure that it meets the agreed-upon standards that we market and promise to the downstream publishers.

Then our editors will make consultative suggestions of how to optimize a story for distribution. We see thousands of stories come through and see what's doing well. They’ll say, “we've seen that when this type of headline is phrased as a question, it will get a lot more placements,” or “you're saying you're the number one provider of X service, and you should probably just take that out.” That's fine when it's on your website; it doesn't make sense when it goes live on the Miami Herald site.

The Stacker homepage showing stories available for partners to syndicate.

What’s your biggest challenge right now in the branded content space?

Our biggest challenge is helping marketers wrap their heads around this new world of content distribution. People historically have certain metrics and ways of thinking about content marketing. There are folks who we get on the phone with who say wow, this is the type of distribution we are looking for. But there's other folks who are trying to wrap their heads around the category, asking, is this earned media from PR, is this paid placement because I am technically paying to distribute the content on the platform?

I don't want to use the term category creator, but we're not Taboula selling against Outbrain or PR Newswire selling against Business Wire. It really is a new way of thinking about the value you can extract from the content you're already producing. That's really the biggest challenge right now, helping people understand that, yes, 10 years ago, you put out a press release and you hoped that a reporter wrote about that story, whereas today you can hire a journalist, you can write that story, and you can actually get that entire piece picked up across news outlets in much higher quantities than when you had to rely on a reporter picking up a press release and writing a story themselves.

Ten years ago, you put out a press release and you hoped that a reporter wrote about that story, whereas today you can hire a journalist, you can write that story, and you can actually get that entire piece picked up across news outlets.

How do you imagine Stacker five years from now?

I want to be a de facto must-have for any newsroom across the country as a source of content. Similar to how 20 years ago, it was just accepted that every newsroom incorporated AP content into some part of their daily workflow. I hope that the Stacker newswire is so robust five years from now, with the types of content and the categories we’re covering and obviously the quality of content, that any newsroom thinking about incorporating more content is using Stacker as a name brand in their daily workflow.

Holistically from the brand side, I hope that we've created a world where distributing your content is a given. I hope that in five years, Stacker is not the only option, because that will be good for all parties. I think that brands hiring journalists is an inevitable wave that is only growing. We're just at the precipice of this massive trend. And I hope that brands realize that it's not just about their owned media and how to get people to their site; it's about getting your audience to trust and engage with your brand by giving them access to this content where they want to read it, and there's an incredible synergy in distributing to third-party news outlets.

Especially as we see that attribution is dying, and there's so much talk about zero-click content. You’re just not able to draw that path anymore, of “consume this piece of content, enter the funnel, go through the funnel, become a customer.” It's much more about brand awareness and building trust.

The thing that really hammered that home for me is, we work with a company in the telehealth space that makes hair loss meds and ED meds and everything in between. And they said, look, we spend a lot of money on Google Ads, on Instagram ads, on paid performance marketing. But we also understand that no one is going to buy ED meds from a company they have never heard of. Just seeing our brand on a bus stop ad is not what's going to make people trust us. What's going to make people trust us is seeing content from us that helps establish us as an authority in healthcare.

They know that no one is going to read one of their articles and then say, oh, I need to go buy this medicine. But this is the content that's going to make their performance marketing actually work and drive customers. I think for a lot of brands with really highly considered purchases, that is how they need to be thinking about it.

If a consumer brand is considering building out their own brand journalism, what do you advise them to consider

I’ve thought a lot about this and I have a few criteria. One is, are you willing to look at this as not a short-term investment? The folks having a hard time with this are the folks who are hiring someone and saying, okay, we're looking at this as performance marketing – in three months, how many customers will this drive?

Two is making the decision that building brand authority matters. Do we really need to establish ourselves as an authority to win in this market?

The third is, how do you establish this in a small manner? I think a mistake that some organizations make is they go all in and say, okay, we're going to hire 10 journalists. And then it's a really big line item in the budget that is easy to cut when times get tough. Starting small and defining those goals is really important.

Megan Bungeroth is an editorial consultant and the founder of Sleight of Brand, a biweekly newsletter with interviews and insights about B2C branded content and brand journalism.