This CEO keeps going viral for thirst-trapping journalists with $200,000 jobs to be head of content. Yes, he’s trying to prove a point

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.

“The tech editor at the Wall Street Journal is now the managing editor at NVIDIA,” he said, referring to Shara Tibken. “Robinhood 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.”

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. “To me,” he said, “it’s less important what it’s called, and more important that the work exists.” He reads all of them, engages selectively, and keeps posting.

“I pull myself back,” he said of the comment-section fights that occasionally ignite. “A good friend of mine who got into a very public spat said, ‘Roll in mud like pig, get dirty like pig.'”

The bootstrapped wiring underneath

Before the LinkedIn persona, there was the company—and 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—not because anyone was paying them to, but because the content was genuinely good.

“NerdWallet had hired Maggie Leung from CNN,” he said. “Zillow had hired a chief economist. And through talking with a lot of news outlets, we realized, ‘Hey, there’s some of this stuff that we’d love to publish, we just don’t want to sift through 100 pitches to figure out what’s legit.'”

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 — 90% of them local — 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. (It also makes revenue from a services/studio business and selling advertising on its site.) The company has never raised outside funding.

Stacker’s in-house editorial standards are stricter than some might expect. Instacart, for example, can’t describe itself as “the number one food delivery service in the country.” Experian can’t 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—because the underlying data was real and the story was newsworthy. “At our best, we are hanging distribution as a carrot to incentivize [brands] to improve the quality of their content,” Greenberg said, “that’s the opportunity.”

The brand journalist on the other side

Tracy Middleton spent 20 years in magazines—Men’s Health, Women’s Health, editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal—before joining Hone Health, a men’s hormone health company, nearly five years ago to build its editorial operation from scratch. She calls herself a “brand journalist,” a term she didn’t coin but has adopted. Her team includes an executive editor from Reader’s Digest, Prevention and U.S. News & World Report and an SEO/GEO specialist who went to journalism school—a “unicorn,” Middleton said, because she understands both........

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