Bria Bell's first job as a local TV news reporter in Iowa paid so little that she qualified for food stamps. She never claimed them, but some of her co-workers did. Bell covered her own hair and makeup, stretched every paycheck, and kept showing up camera-ready regardless. When she eventually started to consider leaving journalism, she sought advice anonymously in online forums, careful not to leave a trace. Stations could sue reporters who shopped around before their contracts expired, and the penalties ran into the thousands. For someone barely covering rent, that kind of risk has a way of keeping you in place.
At J.P. Morgan, where Bell is now a communications VP, this past bonus season brought a check that matched what she once earned as a reporter in an entire year. “When I saw that number, it was a full-circle moment,” she said. “It made me a little emotional.”
Bell is one of many journalists who have crossed over to the brand side in recent years — a quiet shift reshaping both newsrooms and the companies absorbing their talent. A recent survey of 367 editors by recruiter Chandra Turner found that 66% have left traditional media for roles in content, communications, and marketing.
We’ve seen the trend play out in big-name moves and job postings: a Wall Street Journal editor leaving to run NVIDIA’s technical blog; a former editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest crossing over to launch an editorial platform for RH. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — the very companies spending billions to build technology that generates infinite text — are paying a premium to hire human storytellers.
In fact, the percentage of LinkedIn listings mentioning the term “storyteller” doubled last year, The Wall Street Journal reported in a widely circulated piece titled “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’.” For weeks, the WSJ story was inescapable on LinkedIn. Vindicated writers shared it en masse, a collective “I told you so” to those who’d predicted their obsolescence. Reporting isn’t dead; it’s simply taking a new form, they rallied.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post laid off a third of its staff in February. In the U.S., media job losses increased by 15% from 2024 to 2025. And the erosion of news in the country goes beyond firings: nearly 40% of all local newspapers have vanished since 2005.
The uncertainty besieging traditional media has many consequences. A less-discussed one is that companies can no longer rely on a shrinking press corps to tell their stories — so they’re building in-house teams to do it themselves.
But can the journalists who once served the public interest find a new sense of purpose? How do you take an instinct to hold institutions to account and redirect it toward brand-building? What do writers gain when they cross over to the other side?
The crossover
Jonah Freedman spent five years at Sports Illustrated before being poached by Major League Soccer, North America’s professional soccer league, with an offer to build an editorial platform from scratch. That first step led to a 16-year journey through Under Armour, Salesforce, and now, B2B tech company Automation Anywhere, where Freedman leads content marketing. On the financial side, at least, the direction was clear. “The paycheck is nice,” he said. “Much nicer than in journalism. If you have a family to support, that’s a huge driver.”
When Bell left the news, her salary was bumped up to six figures. But the benefits go well beyond finances. Her work-life balance improved, by her own estimation, “1,000%.” As a TV reporter, her schedule wasn’t her own. “In news, I felt consumed,” she said. “In my current role, work is a part of my day-to-day. It’s not everything.”
But not everyone finds the landing so clean. Boston-based content marketer Chris Caesar previously spent years covering local news. His reporting uncovered corruption and sparked city probes, but he grew tired of the job instability and low pay. When he moved into content marketing, he earned “two to three times” his newsroom salary by writing for brands like Meta. But when his last full-time contract wasn’t renewed, he spent six months searching for work, sat through more than a dozen interviews, and eventually took a job at Home Depot to supplement his freelance work. “I thought having a FANG [Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, or Google] company on my resume would be a door opener,” he said. “But it doesn’t really seem to be doing that much for me.”
Turner, founder of the editorial recruiting agency The Talent Fairy, has spent six years surveying editors (a term she uses to refer to anyone working in content management or strategy across editorial or marketing) about their work. She asks those who left newsrooms whether they’re happy they did. This year, for the first time, she offered a third response option: “It’s complicated.” Some 54% of respondents chose it.
“They’re happy that they left traditional media because they’re making more money, they have better work-life balance, and they have more stability. Still, there’s a lot they still desperately miss,” she said, referring to the excitement, prestige, and purpose-driven nature of newsroom work.
Turner paused. “But they don’t necessarily regret leaving. Because there’s nothing to go back to,” she said.
Unlearning the newsroom
The transition from newsroom to brand is about more than a change of employer. The rhythms of work, incentives, and definitions of success vary from the former to the latter. The newsroom recognizes individual sharpness; the brand side tends to reward collaboration — and compromise. It requires, as several people interviewed for this piece described, a rewiring of professional instincts.
“As a journalist, you are taught to see the glass as always half empty,” Freedman said. “The world is full of bullshit, and it’s your job to find the truth and cut through to it.” Marketers, by contrast, are trained for optimism — to imagine the most compelling version of a product’s story, he argued. “Coming in with an ax, saying, ‘This is all false,’ does not fly. You do not make friends that way,” Freedman warned.
Caesar ran into a different challenge. In journalism, his name was on every story. In content marketing, he had to put his ego aside. “I learned to stop being so precious about my work,” he said. “There are a lot more stakeholders involved, and the function of the content is different than what it would be in a newspaper. So I learned to stop being so worried about getting my voice on the page and let it be more of a team process.”
Bell, meanwhile, had to figure out how to slow down. “The news world is a lot faster than corporate America,” she said. “I had to learn to reel it back. I’m like, ‘What do you mean this can’t be done by 5 p.m. today?’ I was used to going live every day.”
How much unlearning is required really depends on where journalists land. Brand journalism — content produced with journalistic rigor, in service of a company’s long-term reputation rather than short-term sales targets — tends to reward the same instincts that make good reporters. In communications or content marketing roles, however, stakeholder management and business metrics can pull hard against what the newsroom trains journalists to do.
But the core skills are transferable. Journalists naturally see content through the eyes of the reader — they were “audience-first” before the term became a buzzword, Turner pointed out. “We figure out how to tap into a mood or emotion, and understand what people are thinking, feeling, and what they need. We feel the zeitgeist and know which way the wind is blowing,” she said.
When Bell first started at J.P. Morgan, she was “incredibly nervous.” But the new instincts she needed developed “naturally, out of my writing — the ability to make something mundane sound fun and new; to get on a call and articulate the mission and the goal.
"When obstacles arise, do I have a pit in my stomach? A little bit,” Bell admitted. “But simultaneously, I have 10 ideas of how we can overcome this. You can call it tenacity, you can call it being innovative, you can call it resiliency. It’s there.”
The identity crisis
In a survey of about 350 former journalists who had left the field, University of Kansas professor Scott Reinardy found that 36% still identified as journalists, despite working in entirely different jobs.
Ann Marie Awad, editorial director at the Institute for Independent Journalists (IIJ), compares leaving journalism to leaving a religion. “To do journalism, you have to care very deeply,” said Awad, who is also a journalist and podcast host. “I’ve met very few people in my life for whom it’s just a job, the kind of thing where you’re clocking in from nine to five.”
For Bell, journalistic instincts and skills aren’t tied to a job title. They belong to her. “I do still consider myself a journalist, both personally and professionally,” she said. “I’m always checking the source. I’m always documenting for paper trail purposes.” She helps executives prepare for conferences and industry events, work that draws directly on years of on-camera coaching, deadline management, and rapid-fire problem-solving.
Turner argues that the category itself has become unstable. Bloomberg used to be known only for its financial data terminals; now it’s one of the most respected names in financial journalism. Costco runs one of the largest print publications in the U.S. Red Bull sells energy drinks — and has a film studio. The new line that is being blurred is not between editorial and advertising, she argues: it’s between what is a media company and what isn’t.
Who gets left behind
Beyond Turner’s survey, no comprehensive data exists on how many journalists have left traditional media for content roles. What we do know is that the journalism industry is shedding employees at an accelerating pace, and the pattern of who gets pushed out is not random.
The IIJ surveyed 176 journalists who were laid off from 2022 to 2024. Journalists of color — who represent just 17% of the journalism workforce — made up 42% of respondents. Women, who make up 46% of the industry, comprised 68%.
The IIJ’s early-career survey data was what shook Awad most: journalists aged 26 to 35 made up 41% of respondents. “People come out of school, work a job for a couple of years, get laid off, and remain jobless for a year or two,” she explained. “And then they start the cycle over again.” The pathways that carried her into the profession, Awad said, have begun to disappear.
Where brands go wrong
Many journalists leave newsrooms in search of something the industry has long struggled to offer: stability. What they sometimes find on the brand side is a different version of the same problem.
Freedman has watched content marketing budgets swell and collapse with metronomic regularity. “Every time there’s a downturn in the economic cycle, you go for marketing first,” he said. “And usually the most expendable are the content marketers and creatives.” He has seen SEO strategies deliver measurable wins, only to be undermined by algorithm shifts. He has watched leadership request blog posts with no distribution plan. At one brand, Freedman was told to “make [content] go viral” — “the stupidest thing in the world,” he pointed out — and was eventually laid off when the company’s content strategy was abandoned.
Caesar, meanwhile, has seen agencies rush to scale content that amounts to little more than AI slop. “A lot of agencies I’ve worked with seem to be falling into this trap of using AI to write these outlines that are clearly geared for SEO and just lifeless. More boring than a textbook, " he said.
One of Turner’s clients recently let her entire roster of freelance writers go and replaced them with AI, keeping only two editors on staff to edit the output. Turner is already seeing copywriters, social media managers, and copy editors lose their jobs. “You only need one person to run all the bots,” she sighed.
Turner has noticed the same pattern in content as Awad did in journalism: the jobs disappearing first are often entry level. The pipeline for developing editorial talent is narrowing precisely when the demand for experienced editors is growing.
Caesar believes a correction is coming. The flood of AI-generated content will eventually make human editorial judgment more valuable, not less, he said. In the meantime, he’s still job-hunting. “You don’t go into being a writer thinking that you’re going to have a super-steady job,” he said. “But I thought it would be steadier than this, especially if I transitioned into marketing.”
The case for optimism
There is a version of this story that is purely about loss: the hollowing of newsrooms, the dispersal of talent, the dilution of a profession. But something more interesting is happening.
According to a 2025 Gallup poll, just 28% of Americans trust the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly — a record low since Gallup began tracking in the 1970s. The Edelman Trust Barometer found that 80% of people trust the brands they use more than they trust government, media, or NGOs.
The gap between those two numbers is the business case for brand journalism.
Some are already running with it. Sherwood News produces financial journalism competitive with Bloomberg. Patagonia’s editorial team reads like a National Geographic masthead. Hone Health’s content has a medical advisory board that publishers would envy. What separates these publications from all the other content on the internet? The editorial standards and emphasis on audience trust found in newsrooms.
Brand media is no substitute for an independent press. But for reporters and editors, it might be the job they were training for all along. Or, at least, the closest approximation to it in this economy. What’s clear is that the line that once separated newsrooms from brands has blurred.
Turner’s advice, when people ask her where to go next, is pointed: don’t chase a traditional media company. Chase the brands trying to become one.
“They’re all scrambling around trying to fight for the last little bits of SEO and advertiser revenue, and there isn’t enough to go around. They’re relying on an old model,” she said.
“Go work for somebody who’s trying to be a media company. At least they’re bringing in the money.” —Jennifer Guay
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