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 to run its content operation. A healthcare startup advertising a head of content role at double what most masthead editors make. Noah Greenberg is posting them all—and the engagement is, by his own admission, a marketing ploy.
“The reason I started posting on LinkedIn two years ago was because no one had heard of us,” Greenberg, the CEO of content syndication company Stacker, told Fortune. “And I found that one cheap trick was posting a list of jobs for those types of people once a week.” He rejected the notion that he’s a one-man employment agency for people looking to leave journalism, but he admitted, “it kind of caught fire.”
But the trick is in service of a thesis that’s backed by a business that’s grown from a $3 million run rate to north of $10 million in under two years, all without raising a dollar of venture capital.
The LinkedIn bait is the argument
Greenberg was quick to clarify he’s not celebrating the death of journalism. What he’s cataloguing is a structural shift in who funds it.
