Company data sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere just broke a national news story. Here’s how.
Journalists find news everywhere: from conversations and interviews, research reports and press releases, and things they observe out in the real world.
One way reporters are increasingly breaking news is by using data that is pulled from companies’ internal records and shared with them by marketing and communications teams.
As more of everyday life gets outsourced to and run through tech platforms, content distribution company Stacker examined how the companies running those platforms have become well-positioned to chronicle how human behavior is changing.
Turning internal metrics into front-page news
Companies have long had their executives serve as spokespeople to lend expertise to a topic in the news, but the practice of using internal data to create news stories is a growing trend.
Take Ramp, for example. Ramp is a financial technology company that helps businesses manage corporate cards and expenses.
Using the view that it has into how companies spend their money, Ramp began researching the number of U.S. companies that use artificial intelligence. It then used that information to break news, like when it wrote an article about how Anthropic had surpassed OpenAI in adoption by U.S. businesses for the first time. News outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Business Insider then wrote about the trend and cited Ramp as the source.
Ramp’s lead economist, Ara Kharazian, shared how he approaches this work during a panel discussion at Cited, an industry conference hosted by Stacker in June.
“There’s a key principle of economics that says that people make better decisions when they have access to better data,” Kharazian said. “What I really wanted to start with was showing answers to questions that business owners could not otherwise answer themselves, and try to illuminate those decisions with better data.”
Kelly Soderlund, head of insights at Samsara, said during the same panel discussion that her team has used proprietary data to track things like construction buildup around the World Cup stadiums in the two years before the tournament kicked off. Samsara is a tech company that helps businesses manage physical operations and logistics, so it has access to that kind of data.
In a previous role at corporate travel platform Navan, Soderlund tracked business travel patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic to counter the popular narrative that the industry had been irreparably harmed by lockdowns and quarantine protocols.
But she said one of her favorite stories was a piece she worked on at the beginning of her career, when she wrote data stories for the travel company Hipmunk. She used the company’s data to show that bookings fell at Trump Hotels during President Trump’s first campaign in 2016. Her story got national attention and earned her phone calls from reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Soderlund said during the panel discussion that companies with access to this kind of information have a lot to add to public conversation and understanding.
“What you’re really revealing is human behavior. It is an insight into how humans are actually acting out in the real world,” Soderlund said. “You’re able to take that and tell these amazing stories and hopefully get amplification.”
And it’s not just these brands — plenty of recent examples show how companies can serve as the main source of information for a news story. The Wall Street Journal used Redfin data to report on the housing market shifting toward buyers, and Indeed’s jobs data regularly gets coverage in places like The New York Times and Bloomberg.
A growing industry
This all plays into the growth of a field known as brand journalism. Similar to traditional journalism, this type of work involves researching and writing articles, but they are ultimately published by a corporation instead of an independent newsroom. Brand journalists might write news coverage of current events or explain scientific research, but they do so with the goal of promoting a company’s expertise in a particular field.
The brand journalism industry is increasingly improving its standards of disclosure and transparency — supporting all claims with evidence and fact-based research, for example, and avoiding publishing pieces that could be seen as purely self-serving. Still, critics of brand journalism sometimes question how a newsroom created and run by a corporation can truly be objective.
As layoffs continue to plague traditional media — with an estimated 3,400 U.S. and U.K. journalists losing their jobs so far in 2026, according to the Press Gazette — there are fewer journalists working than ever. And moving into brand journalism is itself becoming more common as a career path.
An analysis by Alex Hamilton of workforce insights company Live Data Technologies found that more than 2,800 journalists have taken roles in brand journalism in the last decade. Hamilton’s analysis used Live Data Technologies’ workforce intelligence data to track role changes from publications into brand journalism, content, or communications roles between January 2015 and May 2026. He found that between 230 and 340 journalists are making this type of job transition each year.
As more companies invest in editorial operations that rely on their own data to tell stories about the world, it’ll become more likely that everyday readers will come across this trend in their news consumption.
This story was produced, reviewed, and distributed by Stacker.